Speaker 1: Al Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 3: It could happen here.
Speaker 4: It's the podcast where things happen and you do something
Speaker 4: about it. I'm your host, Via Wong, and we have
Speaker 4: done you know, okay, over the course of this we
Speaker 4: have done so many Union episodes that I lost count
Speaker 4: a year ago, two years ago, I don't even know.
Speaker 3: I lost count at the dawn of time of how
Speaker 3: many of these we've done.
Speaker 4: But something I think some of you probably know this,
Speaker 4: but a lot of you don't, is that many unions
Speaker 4: have their own unions for the people who to do
Speaker 4: staff work, to do sort of a number of other things,
Speaker 4: and sometimes unions us their own unions, and this unbelievably sucks.
Speaker 4: And to talk about an instance of this happening that
Speaker 4: is happening right now, I am talking with Alex Chan,
Speaker 4: who is an organizer for the UAW, who is I
Speaker 4: don't know what.
Speaker 3: Technical term is.
Speaker 4: I'm going to describe it non legally bindingly as being purged.
Speaker 3: For doing organizing. But yeah, Alex, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Hi, it's nice to be here. I think being purged
Speaker 1: is a great way to describe it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the tentative title for this is the UAW Staff Purge,
Speaker 4: So it's not great.
Speaker 3: So why don't we start off.
Speaker 4: I've given a very very brief sort of description of
Speaker 4: what a staff union is, but can you talk a
Speaker 4: bit more broadly about what a staff union is, what
Speaker 4: it does, and why you all are sort of trying
Speaker 4: to organize one.
Speaker 1: Of course, So in terms of staff unions, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: definitely an interesting phenomenon for people who are less familiar
Speaker 1: with the labor movement. But when unions have a lot
Speaker 1: of staff, sometimes those also need a union to make
Speaker 1: sure that they are treated fairly in the workplace. Coincidentally,
Speaker 1: this year, there have been a lot of incidents that
Speaker 1: have shown why staff unions are happening in the first place.
Speaker 1: And so with my union, we are called UAW Staff United.
Speaker 1: We are part of Region nine A of the UAW.
Speaker 1: UAW is split into a lot of geographic regions, and
Speaker 1: nine A covers New York and New England, including Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut,
Speaker 1: New Hampshire, Vermont, not New York State. New York State
Speaker 1: is covered by Region nine. So we are a bunch
Speaker 1: of temporary organizers and local staff that are organizing for
Speaker 1: a lot of things, among them wages, workload, job security, healthcare,
Speaker 1: and so on so forth, very normal things that you
Speaker 1: would actually see in a lot of the contracts that
Speaker 1: we help fight for, in the shops that we work
Speaker 1: for and organize, and the units that we help support.
Speaker 1: So UAW Staff United otherwise known as.
Speaker 3: Yuzu like the fruit. Oh that's fun, No, it's cute, right.
Speaker 1: We really love the user imagery a lot. We were
Speaker 1: formed in twenty twenty three, first went public in the spring.
Speaker 1: I joined the unit in the summer, but I was
Speaker 1: just kind of peripherally around and organizing with a lot
Speaker 1: of these folks before they went public in the spring.
Speaker 1: Got recognized slowly and then slowly came to the bargaining
Speaker 1: table in August, and so at this point we have
Speaker 1: been at the bargaining table for over a year and
Speaker 1: we still do not have a contract. Normally, in most
Speaker 1: shops that you would see organizing, that would be cause
Speaker 1: for escalation, and so that is actually part of what
Speaker 1: we are doing here. After hitting one full year bargaining,
Speaker 1: we are still very stuck on items such as wages,
Speaker 1: job security, yep, all the very normal things that we
Speaker 1: can see in units that we help support and bargain for.
Speaker 1: And so the situation that we're facing is slightly more
Speaker 1: complicated because of many other internal things that For example,
Speaker 1: UAW has another staff union it is called Staff Council,
Speaker 1: and that covers more regions of UAW rather than nine A.
Speaker 1: It also includes people who are our direct supervisors. On paper,
Speaker 1: those people are called lead organizers and they do make
Speaker 1: low six figures and yes they are our direct supervisors.
Speaker 1: So they are a managerial union and they are what
Speaker 1: some people may call a business union, you know, works
Speaker 1: closely with management to secure a good deal, that kind
Speaker 1: of thing. It's never really been known to agitate in
Speaker 1: a contract, and that is partially one reason why UZU
Speaker 1: was formed, because we knew that some agitation needed to
Speaker 1: happen in order to secure actually good treatment for people
Speaker 1: in our position, our position meaning temp and local staff.
Speaker 1: Now I keep saying temp staff, right, is that the
Speaker 1: next question?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I am so good, I'm one step ahead.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I want to talk about both a the way
Speaker 4: your contracts work, and be what the thing you're actually
Speaker 4: doing is, because I'm not sure, I'm not sure people
Speaker 4: are one hundred percent familiar with what specifically you do
Speaker 4: and what a what a sort of like staff you
Speaker 4: need organizer does and the difference between you and the
Speaker 4: people that are sort of the organizer layer above you
Speaker 4: is Yeah.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, So that has to go a little bit into
Speaker 1: how we are hired. And that's why I kept saying
Speaker 1: temp staff and local staff. Yeah, our unit is formed
Speaker 1: somewhat on our pay structure, and so temp organizers are
Speaker 1: hired by the international or the region, and local staff
Speaker 1: are hired by the locals, which is kind of a
Speaker 1: sub unit of the regions and how different unions are organized.
Speaker 1: There could be multiple units in one local, a local
Speaker 1: may hire a staffer, but that staffer could be subsidized
Speaker 1: by the international, and that is kind of what our
Speaker 1: uniformation is like, where funding comes from the international and
Speaker 1: this layer of people does the most. In New organizing,
Speaker 1: so supporting new shops that form, new campaigns, that are
Speaker 1: organizing new unions that are just forming and need to
Speaker 1: secure an election or a first contract. Some of our
Speaker 1: colleagues go a little bit further into the stage because
Speaker 1: of their local staff status where they're supporting contract renewals
Speaker 1: or bargaining around the second stage. But a lot of
Speaker 1: these has to do with on the ground, worker to worker,
Speaker 1: peer to peer organizing, supporting them and many different ways,
Speaker 1: including data work, including just resources. Think of how the
Speaker 1: parent union might be supporting a new shop. We are
Speaker 1: kind of the resources that are supporting the new shop
Speaker 1: that can help direct institutional knowledge, that can help direct
Speaker 1: logistical or legal information like how or what is necessary
Speaker 1: for an election or a petition, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: And yeah, it's a lot of different tasks and that's
Speaker 1: why for a lot of us, our job description is
Speaker 1: I'm doing air quotes here a flexible forty.
Speaker 3: Hour work week, Jess Christ.
Speaker 1: And of course that usually means a lot more than
Speaker 1: that when campaigns ramp up, and so you know, there
Speaker 1: are a lot of different models on how to combat that,
Speaker 1: but I'll get into that a bit later. So going
Speaker 1: back to the difference between us and perhaps our direct supervisors.
Speaker 1: Our direct supervisors may be tasked with monitoring the status
Speaker 1: of a lot of different campaigns at the same time,
Speaker 1: and we might be assigned to one or two or
Speaker 1: three at a time to work very very directly with
Speaker 1: the organizers and the new workers. Of course, this looks
Speaker 1: slightly different across different locals or different campaigns can be
Speaker 1: adjusted depending on the shop's needs. But our supervisors, who
Speaker 1: are the leads, will be handling a lot of different
Speaker 1: campaigns at the same time and just like kind of
Speaker 1: overseeing that progress and giving the okay for the next
Speaker 1: stage or or whatsoever. So I wanted to go back
Speaker 1: a little bit to why we are called temp organizers.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is nuts. Well, I'm so angry that I
Speaker 3: forgat about this.
Speaker 1: So do you know what a temp organizer is?
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is actually weird. So I have friends who
Speaker 4: are staff organizers for other unions that it doesn't work
Speaker 4: like this. So yeah, I'm going to let you explain it,
Speaker 4: because I.
Speaker 1: Mean, do let me know about those in another Yeah,
Speaker 1: but for temp organizers in UAW, this is a holdover
Speaker 1: from the kind of older model of organizing where theoretically
Speaker 1: a worker might come off the shop floor for six
Speaker 1: months nine months to do union work and then go
Speaker 1: back to the shop floor when that concludes, so that
Speaker 1: the job would remain open for them. So temporary, like
Speaker 1: the nature is temporary. Someone is coming off to do
Speaker 1: union work, and then you know, sometimes it's even part time, right,
Speaker 1: sometimes it's even part time, and the worker never stops
Speaker 1: working at their original job. But nowadays the model doesn't
Speaker 1: look like that anymore, right because, especially in say higher
Speaker 1: ed shops, people graduate out of their graduate union jobs.
Speaker 1: People may not have their reappointment if they are an
Speaker 1: adjunct or contract faculty. And then a lot of our
Speaker 1: unit members u zoom meaning a lot of our yu
Speaker 1: zoo members come out of a shop that is UAW
Speaker 1: whether that means they're legal services or museum workers or
Speaker 1: higher ed, but it is less common nowadays to have
Speaker 1: a job to return to. However, the model remains the
Speaker 1: same in that the temporary organizer job has three month
Speaker 1: renewals and a three year cap. Every three months our
Speaker 1: contract is renewed, and if we hit three years on
Speaker 1: this job, we are no longer hired. Theoretically, you could
Speaker 1: be hired to another job internally, but there's no pipeline,
Speaker 1: there is no internal movement that way, you would have
Speaker 1: to apply to the job like a regular other job
Speaker 1: that is a more full term job, or you just
Speaker 1: kind of like quote unquote like age out the system
Speaker 1: and you're just no longer an organizer. You no longer
Speaker 1: have a job. And so this has manifested in a
Speaker 1: lot of different ways that a lot of my colleagues
Speaker 1: that have gotten tired or burnt out and have decided
Speaker 1: to leave before they're three years or leave at their
Speaker 1: three years of their own will. There are folks that
Speaker 1: have left way earlier than their three years as well
Speaker 1: to pursue other opportunities. YUZU at any given time has
Speaker 1: about forty to fifty members and that is our nine
Speaker 1: a unit. Again, one thing that we have come to
Speaker 1: find out is that in the last five years of
Speaker 1: this temp organizer model, only three people who have hit
Speaker 1: their three year cap have managed to attain full term
Speaker 1: jobs in the UAW afterward Cheese. And then there is me, who,
Speaker 1: again within the last five years, is the only person
Speaker 1: to have been not renewed before their three year term,
Speaker 1: very unceremoniously as well as in the middle of very
Speaker 1: active campaigns. That brings us to another piece of context,
Speaker 1: and the reason why I keep saying five years is
Speaker 1: because in twenty eighteen there was a first iteration of
Speaker 1: the Yuzu. There was a first attempt to forming this
Speaker 1: staff union of temp and local staff. Of course it
Speaker 1: was created by different people. But what happened then, especially
Speaker 1: under the Administrative Caucus when it was before the reform
Speaker 1: leadership septed in, is that everyone was just fired Jesus, Yeah,
Speaker 1: everyone was just let go. And there are people still
Speaker 1: around organizing these days in other positions or in other
Speaker 1: workplaces that you have talked to us about it, and
Speaker 1: there are people that are working in user now that
Speaker 1: had friends or were peripheral to that happening. So we
Speaker 1: are all very familiar with how non renewal is a
Speaker 1: very retaliatory practice used in UAW in the past, or
Speaker 1: we thought was in the past, because we were so
Speaker 1: excited to have this reform leadership come in and now
Speaker 1: we are finding out that it is still a tool
Speaker 1: that is consistent. And so when we are excited that
Speaker 1: there is democratic reform, especially with one member, one vote,
Speaker 1: which was extremely extremely exciting to see, we also need
Speaker 1: to point out that there are a lot of different
Speaker 1: places here that still need to change, especially in how
Speaker 1: the union treats its own staff.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and unfortunately we need to go to ads. We'll
Speaker 4: come back. I want to circle back around and talk
Speaker 4: a bit more about the ways of the UAW is
Speaker 4: acting like a fairly conventional boss trying to break a union.
Speaker 4: And we are back. So there's something really interesting. I
Speaker 4: mean I say interesting, it's something sort of terrible about
Speaker 4: the way that the UAW is relying on effectively a
Speaker 4: casualized workforce because because you're dealing with these constant renewals,
Speaker 4: which are an incredible sort of pressure leverage because it
Speaker 4: means you don't have job security. It feels like the
Speaker 4: way Amazon works where they're just like trying intentionally instead
Speaker 4: of trying to retain people, they're just trying to churn
Speaker 4: through as many organizers as possible because like the more
Speaker 4: seniority people have and the more experience they have, the
Speaker 4: harder it is to like just completely underpay them.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The keyword in here is flexibility.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it seems like, also on an institutional level,
Speaker 3: a terrible idea because you know, you're training a bunch
Speaker 3: of organizers and then the moment that they're you know,
Speaker 3: the moment they have a bunch of experience, you're just
Speaker 3: casting them into the wind and then hiring the less
Speaker 3: experienced person.
Speaker 1: It's like you bring up a great point. Actually, something
Speaker 1: that I want to touch on is end bargaining. We
Speaker 1: have asked for training and we have not been met
Speaker 1: with a satisfactory answer. People are not trained. Oh my
Speaker 1: god before they take on this position. But yes, you're
Speaker 1: absolutely correct with the institutional knowledge aspect. The campaigns that
Speaker 1: I'm working on, the organizing committees are real pissed that
Speaker 1: I have been suddenly disappeared, And I want to highlight
Speaker 1: something that one organizer brought up is that for all
Speaker 1: the talk of us being one big union, how we
Speaker 1: are the union, how we have a democratic saying in
Speaker 1: this process, it's very weird that someone higher up in
Speaker 1: the union can just make one of our members disappear.
Speaker 1: And that is in reference to my unceremonious departure, of course,
Speaker 1: and the points that we, as you you really want
Speaker 1: to highlight and emphasize is that we really want to
Speaker 1: just hold UAW to the values that it has espoused,
Speaker 1: ending tiers, job security for workers, fair wages, like I
Speaker 1: said in bargaining, we had asked for training and that
Speaker 1: has not gone very well. UW is refusing to bargain
Speaker 1: over free speech and continuity representation, which refers to the
Speaker 1: hypothetical scenario if Region nine A were to be absorbed
Speaker 1: somewhere else the right for user to still exist, and
Speaker 1: they refuse to bargain over that we are stuck in
Speaker 1: wages at somewhere around three percent per year of four years. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not great, and there's been a lot of chaos
Speaker 1: behind the scenes that it is implied to be a
Speaker 1: bad thing to let the members know about the members
Speaker 1: that we work with and organize with. But to a
Speaker 1: certain point things boil over, and especially in the case
Speaker 1: where I am suddenly not renewed, it is really important
Speaker 1: in our view that our members know what is happening. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that the members know what this is about, because they
Speaker 1: get the news landed on them after our social media
Speaker 1: posts come out. Because I am told not to inform
Speaker 1: the organizers myself, and so the organizers had to hear
Speaker 1: about it from my supervisors about a week later with
Speaker 1: no details. My non renewal was without cause, without justification,
Speaker 1: without reason. They did not give me an answer to
Speaker 1: my face. And then as Yuzu kept pushing higher ups
Speaker 1: kept flip flopping on who to blame and what the
Speaker 1: actual cause was. And what I'm getting is a sense
Speaker 1: of surprise that people are angry about this in.
Speaker 3: The first place.
Speaker 1: Yeah, as if this was a normal situation, that people
Speaker 1: were just getting fired any other day with a month's notice,
Speaker 1: And they're like, we gave her a month's notice.
Speaker 4: Which also like I feel like, like, what was the last
Speaker 4: a bit of these people were on a shop floor?
Speaker 3: Like do you know how disruptive it is?
Speaker 4: Like if someone had pulled like so we had when
Speaker 4: we were organizing our union, we had we've had a
Speaker 4: number of like great writer, skilled staffers, and if like,
Speaker 4: if someone had just pulled our staffer out in the
Speaker 4: middle of the drive, like all of us would have
Speaker 4: been unbelievably pissed, and it would have done incredible about
Speaker 4: the damage to the organizing because like union organizing, as
Speaker 4: you are well aware, and I think as the audience
Speaker 4: should be increasingly aware, it's built on personal relations. You
Speaker 4: can't just yank someone out and then not allow them
Speaker 4: to even know what's happening. Like that's that's incredibly disruptive.
Speaker 4: It pisses people off.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's been very enraging for a lot of our members,
Speaker 1: and so I've been extremely grateful for the support that
Speaker 1: I received, whether it be on social media or by
Speaker 1: our email campaign to management. And what I've seen from
Speaker 1: this is that management was really taken by surprise that
Speaker 1: there was a reaction at all, kind of unfortunately for them.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of shops and a lot of
Speaker 1: units that I have supported and organized with and have
Speaker 1: relationships with, and even for the shops that I don't
Speaker 1: have relationships with, Yuzu members are working in those shops,
Speaker 1: and there is a common understanding that it'd be really
Speaker 1: weird for a stafford to be randomly pulled out during
Speaker 1: a very active campaign. I've had a rough couple months
Speaker 1: of going at it because I think there have been
Speaker 1: some really unhealthy dynamics in the workplace with supervision that
Speaker 1: was unjust and punishment that was unjust for my attempt
Speaker 1: to advocate for different units and attempt to advocate for organizing.
Speaker 1: And I think that is why we have reached the
Speaker 1: conclusion that retaliation retribution must be involved somehow. On paper,
Speaker 1: this was a very oddly handled situation. I was notified
Speaker 1: by email on three thirty pm on a Friday before
Speaker 1: Labor Day weekend, Jesus Christ. I was not informed by
Speaker 1: a meeting, not informed by a call. My supervisor didn't
Speaker 1: pick up my calls until two and a half hours later.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, in the meantime.
Speaker 1: Where they were actually informing my co workers that I
Speaker 1: had been terminated, and then came back to me saying
Speaker 1: that they were busy Jesus, which no firing happens like that.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, but there was no conceivable way where the
Speaker 1: HR email happens. And then my supervisor is busy telling
Speaker 1: my co workers that I've been let go, which you know,
Speaker 1: we are interpreting as intimidation because why else would this
Speaker 1: be happening.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but even corporate best layoffs don't work like that,
Speaker 4: Like you at least get a meeting.
Speaker 1: No, I didn't get a meeting until the Tuesday after
Speaker 1: to talk about transitioning my work, and they had no
Speaker 1: plan to transition my work. So currently no one is
Speaker 1: handling the work that I was responsible for, which is
Speaker 1: so we.
Speaker 3: Just screw your units.
Speaker 1: That's quite dangerous for campaign and higher ED as the
Speaker 1: semester ramps up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, oh god, oh yeah.
Speaker 1: And of course the hr email was signed in solidarity
Speaker 1: and had no name. I didn't want to bring up
Speaker 1: that point. There is evidence. Yes, it's extraordinarily funny if
Speaker 1: you actually look at it. But yeah, just even if
Speaker 1: we didn't have the context of what has happened to
Speaker 1: me in the workplace in the last six months, even
Speaker 1: just on paper, looking at how this non renewal was handled,
Speaker 1: it was handled atrociously. Yeah, and so there is not
Speaker 1: much else we can draw from it other than the
Speaker 1: fact that I was someone they wanted to get rid
Speaker 1: of expeditiously, but just didn't anticipate that people would be
Speaker 1: mad about it, which is, you know, to me a
Speaker 1: sense that people up there handling it are a little
Speaker 1: out of touch, Like, yeah, they haven't experience what it's
Speaker 1: like to have this happen, to have a staff a
Speaker 1: randomly yanked out during the middle of a really active campaign.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we need to go to ads again, but we will.
Speaker 4: We will be back soon. And what are our product services?
Speaker 4: We're about to have unionize them and then also ugnize
Speaker 4: your staff.
Speaker 3: We are back.
Speaker 4: So it's something we've been talking about in terms of
Speaker 4: sort of your specific situation and how it's the terrible
Speaker 4: impact and it's had on both you personally and the
Speaker 4: organizing that's going on. And I wanted to come around
Speaker 4: to talking a bit about the impact that this structure
Speaker 4: and the impact that getting denied benefits and stuff like that,
Speaker 4: the impact that this has in general on the way
Speaker 4: that organizing new shops works.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that the impact this has very concretely
Speaker 1: is that it does not let us do good work.
Speaker 1: It makes us as organizers scared every three months that
Speaker 1: we have to have another plan. It makes us have
Speaker 1: to prepare a plan every time that rolls around, and
Speaker 1: then you know that takes our focus off of the
Speaker 1: organizing that we could be doing. I mentioned earlier about
Speaker 1: workload organizers get burnt out extremely easily because there are
Speaker 1: no guardrails in place, and then there are plenty plenty
Speaker 1: of other circumstances that make it very difficult within this
Speaker 1: workplace too. For example, we don't have just cause we
Speaker 1: don't have grievance procedures Jesus Christ. And it makes a
Speaker 1: very damaging environment, especially when you consider that the members
Speaker 1: have to bargain for their own contracts, and then they
Speaker 1: look at us and they're like, wait a minute, why
Speaker 1: are your contracts that bad? It doesn't inspire trust. It
Speaker 1: doesn't inspire faith in how this union would organize for
Speaker 1: its workers if the staff are insecure constantly, And we're
Speaker 1: not asking for the moon and the stars in Mars,
Speaker 1: which is unfortunately what the UW lawyer accused us of
Speaker 1: doing so in a bargaining session. We are asking for
Speaker 1: very simple guardrails on job security, on workload, on healthcare
Speaker 1: that could help cover our dependence on wages that are
Speaker 1: not stagnant. You know, they're not even giving us COLA,
Speaker 1: which is the phrase for cost of living adjustment, and
Speaker 1: christ a lot of us live in New York City
Speaker 1: and then there's folks in Boston and hell, even the
Speaker 1: transport costs have been a bit of a sticking point
Speaker 1: where we're like, can we please just get an MTA
Speaker 1: card or the equivalent. But overall, the structure does not
Speaker 1: inspire faith in terms of how our contracts are actually
Speaker 1: negotiated and who is responsible for these contracts. It is
Speaker 1: very difficult to hear from the UAW lawyer that we
Speaker 1: are reaching for Mars when we are asking for things
Speaker 1: that are very present in our standard contracts that our
Speaker 1: members receive. You know, we have taken language from the
Speaker 1: contracts that our members have and tried to apply them
Speaker 1: for our own situation, and we've been told that they're
Speaker 1: too extra. And then, you know, this has been kind
Speaker 1: of an odd year for union staff. I wanted to
Speaker 1: highlight that. Anya Earlier this year in National Education Association,
Speaker 1: their staff were locked out during bargaining eleven ninety nine.
Speaker 1: SCIU also just formed their staff union, and during the
Speaker 1: drive they had one of the organizers fired. Thirty two
Speaker 1: BJSCIU just announced their union and again during their drive,
Speaker 1: one of their organizers. They've posted this on social media.
Speaker 1: One of the organizers had a miscarriage and then asked
Speaker 1: for help, was put on a performance improvement plan, and
Speaker 1: then fired after a month. And you know, there are
Speaker 1: these really uncomfortable trends of this mistreatment happening because priorities
Speaker 1: might be elsewhere, or there is an assumption that we
Speaker 1: are more expendable, that maybe we are kennon fodder, But
Speaker 1: that really really is not what is supposed to happen
Speaker 1: in places that are advocating for fair labor standards. And
Speaker 1: I am glad that we're hearing more stories about this.
Speaker 1: I'm horrified at the stories that are coming out about this,
Speaker 1: but you know, I hope there are more that are
Speaker 1: formed because a lot of these things are very extreme.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it's and it's you know, it's impacting not
Speaker 4: just the organizers. I think one of the reasons why
Speaker 4: unionisation ratesil declining is like, well, yeah, okay, you guys
Speaker 4: can firing all of your organizers, Like yeah, of course,
Speaker 4: we're not getting shops for it. And I want to
Speaker 4: say what I think about just specifically, like the mood
Speaker 4: and the Stars thing is it's like, okay. This is
Speaker 4: not to say that this kind of stuff will be
Speaker 4: okay at a smaller union, but like, this is not
Speaker 4: Like we've had a lot of independent unions on this show,
Speaker 4: and those are people, you know, who have formed their
Speaker 4: own using completely independently. In the money they've collected is
Speaker 4: stuff that's come from them, like putting out their hat
Speaker 4: on the street, right. I mean, you know some of
Speaker 4: these unions have like a thousand dollars of assets. This
Speaker 4: is the UAW. The UAW has hundreds of millions of dollars.
Speaker 4: They have unbelievable amounts of money.
Speaker 1: And earlier this year, they were just bragging about how
Speaker 1: they are putting so many more millions into new organizing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it's like, well, okay, if you're gonna put
Speaker 4: if you're gonna put all this money into organizing, and
Speaker 4: again they probably should they should be doing more, because
Speaker 4: what is the point of sitting on this much money? Right,
Speaker 4: It's like you're behaving like a financial institution and not
Speaker 4: a and not a union, but like you have the
Speaker 4: money to actually like cultivate and develop effective union organizers,
Speaker 4: and you have the money to meet like pretty mild
Speaker 4: contract contracts that are like I think your contract is
Speaker 4: probably significantly cheaper than like the contract that they're negotiating, right,
Speaker 4: Like this is just this is nonsense, Like we know
Speaker 4: you have this kind of money also because you're paying
Speaker 4: your like managerial staff for six figures, So clearly you
Speaker 4: can do this and you're simply not. And I think
Speaker 4: that should outrage everyone.
Speaker 1: I think that's exactly the response of a lot of
Speaker 1: our members because knowing that a lot of our temp
Speaker 1: organizers and staff organizers are people that are most passionately
Speaker 1: devoting themselves to the labor movement, and you know, are
Speaker 1: met with such unstable job conditions is truly horrifying because
Speaker 1: this is not this is not a path to careerism
Speaker 1: like as a temp organizer, there is not much upward
Speaker 1: mobility here. Let me be very clear, there is not
Speaker 1: much upward mobility. It's not like this is a cushy job.
Speaker 1: There is no real way for me to just like
Speaker 1: sit back and relax on piles of bureaucratic money or
Speaker 1: something like that. And that reminds me of how I
Speaker 1: shout out to our Korean comrades that I've met at
Speaker 1: labor notes, where I explained to them what a temporary
Speaker 1: organizer's job is like and how many people we handle
Speaker 1: and how temporary our status is. I was talking to
Speaker 1: some of our equivalents in the auto industry as well,
Speaker 1: the union workers there, and they were pretty horrified at
Speaker 1: the workload, at the insecurity, at the just again lack
Speaker 1: of EQUIVALENCYE. And again I'm not trying to claim that
Speaker 1: Korea's labor organizing world is perfect, like absolutely nobody is.
Speaker 1: But the chakra to them is like, well, why are
Speaker 1: you doing this? Why are you working in this job?
Speaker 1: They have asked me this to my face, why are
Speaker 1: you working in this job? What is possibly good enough
Speaker 1: for that for you, And unfortunately a lot of it
Speaker 1: is optimism of the will, and I think that's a
Speaker 1: lot of what's keeping us going. And so my last
Speaker 1: day is supposedly September twenty eighth, but hopefully this month
Speaker 1: there have been fantastic outpourings of support and we are
Speaker 1: also picketing the political Leadership conference on the Friday the thirteenth, scary,
Speaker 1: and I think that is going to really align with
Speaker 1: how YUSUS needed to escalate. I think this is again
Speaker 1: just a boiling point, and it has shown how all
Speaker 1: of this culminates in a very unfair labor standard and
Speaker 1: practice of which we have filed a few charges. But
Speaker 1: there's a lot more that needs to be done. And
Speaker 1: even if I don't get reinstated, I think that USU
Speaker 1: is a great example of how there's still more change
Speaker 1: that needs to happen within UAW.
Speaker 3: Yeah, hundred percent.
Speaker 4: I want to close by talking about through line through
Speaker 4: a lot of these episodes that we've We've talked with
Speaker 4: a lot of people who work for Planned Parenthood, We've
Speaker 4: talked for a lot of people who work for NGOs,
Speaker 4: and this is the same behavior that they do where
Speaker 4: you know, quite frankly, what they are doing is exploiting,
Speaker 4: exploiting the labor of people who believe in the cause,
Speaker 4: and because people are willing to, you know, because because
Speaker 4: people believe in what they're doing, because the work that
Speaker 4: they're doing is vital and necessary, These NGOs and these
Speaker 4: unions think that they can just continuously exploit the people
Speaker 4: who work for them, and this damages the workers, This
Speaker 4: damages the people who they're nominally trying to help, and
Speaker 4: this damages the entire left because when you're sort of
Speaker 4: charting through organizers and when you're sort of fundamentally betraying
Speaker 4: the missions that you're supposed to be doing in order
Speaker 4: to just do more exploitation, this significantly damages literally the
Speaker 4: entire organizing project that we're all fighting for. So Alex,
Speaker 4: thank you so much for coming and talking and talking
Speaker 4: to us about this and I where can people go
Speaker 4: to support you and support you? Zoo?
Speaker 1: Our accounts are UAW staff United on Instagram and Twitter.
Speaker 1: Please follow for more. Check out the adorable Yuzu Lemon
Speaker 1: logos that we have everywhere. If you're in New York
Speaker 1: or Boston, those are our major hubs. We keep an
Speaker 1: eye off for future actions.
Speaker 4: Awesome, thank you again for coming on the show. And yeah,
Speaker 4: if you are a union staffer, because I know I
Speaker 4: know a number of you are listening to this.
Speaker 3: If you're in the UAW, raise hell.
Speaker 4: And if you're not in the UAW and you don't
Speaker 4: have your own staff union, consider it.
Speaker 1: Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you, Robert Evans. Here, this is It could
Speaker 2: happen here a podcast about things falling apart, and today
Speaker 2: I wanted to take some time to talk about Ukraine,
Speaker 2: in particularly to talk about the sort of cultural place
Speaker 2: that the Ukrainian resistance against Russia expanded invasion by Russia
Speaker 2: has taken in American politics and in American kind of
Speaker 2: political culture. Obviously, I am recording this within a few
Speaker 2: hours of another attempted assassination on former President Trump, this
Speaker 2: one by a guy who, among a confusing milange of
Speaker 2: other things, claimed to be a major advocate of Ukrainian
Speaker 2: sovereignty and that that was a major reason why he
Speaker 2: was angry at the Republicans and angry at former President Trump,
Speaker 2: and kind of that at least failed assassination attempt is
Speaker 2: sort of in line with a lot of derangement around Ukraine,
Speaker 2: and you can find this on the left and the
Speaker 2: right in the center. I've come to think that if
Speaker 2: you're trying to evaluate sort of how credible someone is
Speaker 2: as a geopolitical expert today, one of the best things
Speaker 2: you can do is kind of look back to early
Speaker 2: February twenty twenty two and see what sort of claims
Speaker 2: they were making about what is going to happen, whether
Speaker 2: or not Russia was actually going to go into Ukraine
Speaker 2: and expand their invasion. And that's obviously, you know, a
Speaker 2: bigger topic than I think we're going to get into today.
Speaker 2: One of the things that I find really interesting when
Speaker 2: I kind of analyze how particularly conservatives have turned on
Speaker 2: the Ukrainian cause, is how kind of incomprehensible that seems,
Speaker 2: just based on the way in which I was raised
Speaker 2: by the conservatives in my life to think about Russia
Speaker 2: and to think about like Russian military aggression. You know,
Speaker 2: I grew up largely in the post Cold War era,
Speaker 2: but my parents were both like raised by Cold warriors.
Speaker 2: They mostly grew up on military basis, and I still
Speaker 2: grew up with an awful lot of the kind of
Speaker 2: Cold War shrapnel, and my sort of ideological training. You know,
Speaker 2: the movie Read Dawn was a big part of my childhood.
Speaker 2: You know, some of those early James Bond movies where
Speaker 2: the Soviet Unions are still the bad guy. You know,
Speaker 2: this was all major stuff for me. So it's it's
Speaker 2: been particularly disorienting kind of watching Philo Russian attitudes infiltrate
Speaker 2: the right and us move from this idea of like
Speaker 2: these people are one way or the other kind of
Speaker 2: a geopolitical opponent of the United States towards these people
Speaker 2: are almost existing in an idealized version of the society
Speaker 2: we bring around. It's been a cause of some whiplash
Speaker 2: for me and for I think a lot of people
Speaker 2: who were raised in that environment and then kind of
Speaker 2: came out of those ideological beliefs. And when we look
Speaker 2: at the kind of turnaround on the right about this stuff.
Speaker 2: One of the people who's been on the bleeding edge
Speaker 2: of this has been Vice presidential candidate JD.
Speaker 3: Vance.
Speaker 2: And in fact, Ukraine might mark the first place where
Speaker 2: Vance really came in ahead of the rest of his
Speaker 2: party on an issue they would all ultimately move in
Speaker 2: behind him on back in early twenty twenty two, in
Speaker 2: the immediate wake of Russia's expanded invasion, Vance told Steve
Speaker 2: Bannon in one of his many ill advised podcast interviews, quote,
Speaker 2: I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way
Speaker 2: or the other. Now is This paragraph from an article
Speaker 2: by Ed Kilgore and New York Magazine makes clear Vance
Speaker 2: was swiftly followed by others. Quote Then Congressman Madison Cawthorn
Speaker 2: paroted Russian propaganda by saying the Ukrainian government is incredibly
Speaker 2: corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies,
Speaker 2: and his colleague Marjorie Taylor Green called the Ukrainians neo Nazis.
Speaker 2: Fox News's Tucker Carlson was a constant font of bitter
Speaker 2: hostility towards USAID for Ukraine. Now Cawthorne was and remains
Speaker 2: now a stooge. But I think it really is kind
Speaker 2: of drilling into the precise wording of his claim here,
Speaker 2: the fact that he's so focused on wokeness within the
Speaker 2: context of a conflict that seems much more serious than
Speaker 2: kind of the standard American culture war bullshit. A lot
Speaker 2: of why we're seeing this has to do with the
Speaker 2: fallout over the Russia Gate culture war that consumed the
Speaker 2: Democrats during the first half of the Trump administration. This
Speaker 2: led to the enemy of the enemy is my friend's
Speaker 2: sort of thinking among the right, and this was stoked
Speaker 2: consciously by Russian propaganda efforts. After Trump left office, these
Speaker 2: efforts were redoubled, especially after the war in Ukraine became
Speaker 2: an existential issue for Putin's regime. A good example of
Speaker 2: the more obvious sort of messaging is this Moscow Times
Speaker 2: article from May of twenty twenty three, with the title
Speaker 2: Russia to build migrant village for conservative American expats. Quote
Speaker 2: Timor Beslangarov, a migration lawyer at Moscow's Vista Foreign Business Support,
Speaker 2: claimed that around two hundred families wish to immigrate to
Speaker 2: Russia for ideological reasons. The reason is propaganda of radical values.
Speaker 2: Today they have seventy genders and who knows what will
Speaker 2: come next. Ria Novosti quoted Bessangarov as saying, echoing President
Speaker 2: Vladimir Putin's frequently deployed grievances against Western countries comparative gender freedom,
Speaker 2: and here we see it again. The focus on hatred
Speaker 2: of woke as a j justification for solidarity with Russia.
Speaker 2: A sizeable plurality of Americans still support the US sending
Speaker 2: aid to Ukraine, and the reality of Russia's invasion is
Speaker 2: hideous enough that the bulk of modern Russian propaganda in
Speaker 2: this country today seems to focus on the woke issue
Speaker 2: more than anything directly relevant to the war. As I
Speaker 2: write this, one of the top stories in the country
Speaker 2: is how a Tennessee based media network, Tenant Media, hired
Speaker 2: a bunch of American influencers like Tim Poole and Dave
Speaker 2: Rubin and paid them north of one hundred grand of
Speaker 2: video to make Russian propaganda. Now, pool and Ruben and
Speaker 2: their fellows claim to be shocked, shocked that a foreign
Speaker 2: government was involved in all and deny acting as unregistered
Speaker 2: foreign agents or breaking the law in any way. We'll
Speaker 2: see how those claims look in a few months. For now,
Speaker 2: I think it's illustrative to turn towards a Wired analysis
Speaker 2: of the content of dozens of Tenant Media videos written
Speaker 2: by Tim Marshman and Drove Merota. It shows us the
Speaker 2: kind of propaganda that Russia found fruit full inceding to
Speaker 2: an American audience quote. This analysis does not show that
Speaker 2: in these videos the influencers were particularly fixated on the
Speaker 2: Ukraine War. The word Ukraine appears in the transcript sixty
Speaker 2: seven times, about as often as misinformation, Christianity, and Clinton.
Speaker 2: It does show the influencers stressing highly divisive culture war
Speaker 2: topics in the videos, which carried titles like trans widows
Speaker 2: are a thing, and it's getting all caps out of hand,
Speaker 2: and race is biological, but gender isn't question mark, question
Speaker 2: mark question mark. The word trans appears one hundred and
Speaker 2: fifty two times and transgender ninety eight, So sixty seven
Speaker 2: times we see Ukraine appear in these transcripts, as opposed
Speaker 2: to well over two hundred times for trans and transgender together. Now,
Speaker 2: if you want a snapshot of just how absurd and
Speaker 2: divorced from reality the culture wars have gotten, the Russian
Speaker 2: government funding a clandestine influence operation considered stoking fears about
Speaker 2: trans people to have a higher rate of return than
Speaker 2: actually propag ggandizing directly about the war in Ukraine. As
Speaker 2: absurd as this sounds, these tactics have borne fruit, and
Speaker 2: I think the reason why is simple. By building a
Speaker 2: sense of solidarity between bigoted American conservatives and what they
Speaker 2: see as a similarly conservative Russia. Now Obviously, the reality
Speaker 2: of the situation is that Russia is not exactly the
Speaker 2: country these people think it is. While it is true
Speaker 2: that the number of Russian adults who consider themselves at
Speaker 2: least somewhat religious skyrocketed after the fall of the USSR
Speaker 2: from eleven percent or so to over fifty percent today,
Speaker 2: much of that is likely just explained by the change
Speaker 2: away from an expressly atheistic government. Even today, Pew Research
Speaker 2: notes quote for most Russians, the return to religion did
Speaker 2: not correspond with a return to church. Across all three
Speaker 2: waves of ISSPD data, no more than about one in
Speaker 2: ten Russians said they attend religious services at least once
Speaker 2: a month. The share of regular attenders monthly or more
Speaker 2: often was two percent to nineteen ninety one, nine percent
Speaker 2: to nineteen ninety eight, and seven percent in two thousand
Speaker 2: and eight. For reference, about thirty two percent of Americans
Speaker 2: currently attend church, synagogue, mosque, et cetera on a weekly basis.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 2: This is down significantly from forty nine percent in nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty eight and does represent a low for church attendance
Speaker 2: in US history. But you can see we still beat
Speaker 2: the Russians in at least active religiosity by a factor
Speaker 2: of like five. Now, one of the modern bugbears of
Speaker 2: the right wing in the US is no fault divorce,
Speaker 2: which often gets wrapped up in conversations about wokeness. Here,
Speaker 2: Russia is also not a bastion of good old fashioned values.
Speaker 2: I'm going to quote from an article in Russia Beyond
Speaker 2: by Nikolay Schefchenko in twenty sixteen. The ratio in Russian
Speaker 2: of divorces to new marriages that year was one to
Speaker 2: one point six, meaning that Russians divorce more often than
Speaker 2: they marry. In recent decades, over sixty percent of marriages
Speaker 2: in Russia ended an official separation. Now, there is precisely
Speaker 2: one issue where Russian culture is in reality more in
Speaker 2: line with the kind of culture American conservatives claim to desire,
Speaker 2: and that is in its treatment of LGBT people and
Speaker 2: ethnic minorities. The last years in Putin's Russia have seen
Speaker 2: a surge in hate crimes against queer Russians, as LGBT
Speaker 2: advocacy organizations have been declared illegal and punished by the government.
Speaker 2: This is the Russia our American right wing finds solidarity with,
Speaker 2: and we shouldn't forget that right when we're looking at
Speaker 2: to what extent do these people see Russia as kind
Speaker 2: of embodying the values they would like to bring to
Speaker 2: the United States. It has a lot less to do
Speaker 2: with actual religiosity, with good old fashioned family values, and
Speaker 2: a lot more to do with hate for specific groups
Speaker 2: of people. And we're going to talk about what that
Speaker 2: means within the context of US politics in a little bit.
Speaker 2: But first here's some ads. So earlier this year, I
Speaker 2: headed to the Republican National Convention, and I had a
Speaker 2: lot on my mind there, But one of the things
Speaker 2: I was kind of interested in is hearing the way
Speaker 2: in which conservatives talked about Ukraine when they felt like
Speaker 2: they were among friends. It was not uncommon to hear
Speaker 2: Ukraine referenced in conversations as a geopolitical enemy of the
Speaker 2: United States. And you know, this is something I encountered
Speaker 2: a number of times, and I wanted to make sure
Speaker 2: it wasn't just a fluke of my own experiences there.
Speaker 2: And I assure you it was not. Michael Witely, who
Speaker 2: Donald Trump picked to chair the RNC, appeared on Fox
Speaker 2: News in April and lumped Ukraine in with China and
Speaker 2: Iran as aggressive adversaries. Of the United States. Now, you know,
Speaker 2: we can quibble on that list for a number of reasons,
Speaker 2: but Ukraine, a country we are currently arming and training
Speaker 2: to fight in our stead, is just kind of absurd
Speaker 2: to describe as an aggressive adversary of the United States.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 2: That very month, Congress voted on a foreign aid package,
Speaker 2: which caused a massive split in the Republican Party. The
Speaker 2: anti Ukraine side was led by voices like Marjorie Taylor Green,
Speaker 2: who told Steve Bannon, the Ukrainian government is attacking Christians.
Speaker 2: The Ukrainian government is executing priests. Russia is not doing that.
Speaker 2: They're not attacking Christianity. Now, like most things, Green says,
Speaker 2: this is not quite accurate. The Guardian noted at the
Speaker 2: time quote. In fact, according to figures from the Institute
Speaker 2: for Religious Freedom, a Ukrainian group, at least six hundred
Speaker 2: and thirty religious sites had been damaged or looted in
Speaker 2: Russia's invasion by December last year. Green received a speaking
Speaker 2: slot at the RNC, as did tech investor David Sachs,
Speaker 2: who spent some of his time on stage arguing that
Speaker 2: Joe Biden somehow provoked the Russians to invade Ukraine by
Speaker 2: talking about NATO expansion. Now, this is a claim you'll
Speaker 2: hear on some segments of the left too, and it
Speaker 2: tends to ignore that Russia invaded back in twenty fourteen
Speaker 2: after a revolution against a Krimlin back to President Yenikovich,
Speaker 2: threw their own plans in the region into disarray. Ukraine
Speaker 2: to this day, despite the expanded invasion, is not a
Speaker 2: part of NATO, and Biden's administration has been leery not
Speaker 2: only of pushing for this, but of supplying Ukraine with
Speaker 2: long range weapons to strike inside Russian territory. The fact
Speaker 2: that Ukrainians and others did start discussing Ukrainian membership in
Speaker 2: NATO after almost a decade of war is certainly not
Speaker 2: among the things that we can blame the Biden administration
Speaker 2: for starting. As I trolled the RNC talking to attendees
Speaker 2: about their feelings on the war, I got a variety
Speaker 2: of responses. The most positive believe that Ukraine had been wronged,
Speaker 2: but that the war was unwinnable, so the US had
Speaker 2: to negotiate some kind of peace. Moore argued that the
Speaker 2: Ukrainians were somehow stealing usaid, which they imagined would be
Speaker 2: put to better use helping Americans. I found this an
Speaker 2: illogical position personally, given that our aid Ukraine has primarily
Speaker 2: taken the form of old weapons systems no longer in
Speaker 2: use by USA troops unless you want to house homeless
Speaker 2: veterans in Bradley fighting vehicles. I don't really see how
Speaker 2: what we've sent Zelensky is much used to the kind
Speaker 2: of Americans who are actually suffering today. The most enlightening
Speaker 2: conversation that I had while I was at the Republican
Speaker 2: Convention about their sentiments on Ukraine came when Garrison and
Speaker 2: I stumbled upon Rudy Giuliani, seated at the booth for
Speaker 2: some streaming network or another, exiled from the main stage
Speaker 2: of the event. I introduced myself to Rudy and we
Speaker 2: started off just talking about how surreal the mood was
Speaker 2: given the recent attempted assassination of the former president.
Speaker 6: He's a conquering hero in history. We would have been
Speaker 6: even without a Saturday. It's Saturday. It's surreal.
Speaker 7: I think people feel they're living through history.
Speaker 6: That image of him in Rallying America has to be
Speaker 6: one of our ten historical great interest now.
Speaker 2: I included that because it's a fun snapshot of just
Speaker 2: how elated Republicans were that week, right before Biden dropped
Speaker 2: out and the whole election changed yet again on a dime.
Speaker 2: From here, Rudy and I moved to talking a bit
Speaker 2: about how badly the Secret Service had fucked up in
Speaker 2: protecting Trump, which is not really something I had a
Speaker 2: particular disagreement with, although I think Juliani was coming at
Speaker 2: it from more of a conspiratorial standpoint than I would.
Speaker 2: I think simple incompetence more or less explains everything that
Speaker 2: happened that day pretty well. This morphed in fairly short
Speaker 2: order into him ranting about how all of this was
Speaker 2: Biden's fault and how no one ever gets fired for
Speaker 2: incompetence in the Biden administration. He brought up Afghanistan and
Speaker 2: that is what led us finally to Ukraine.
Speaker 6: Ukraine would not have happened if he hadn't been a
Speaker 6: complete power at over Afghanis. Now, Yeah, what proof is
Speaker 6: very simple. Pudin invaded three times under the last four presidents,
Speaker 6: because only one president he was scared of.
Speaker 8: It was Trump.
Speaker 6: He invaded under Bush, he invaded under Obama, he invaded
Speaker 6: under Biden. He didn't invade under Trump. So don't tell
Speaker 6: me he would have invaded on the Trump you had
Speaker 6: a chance.
Speaker 2: To what he did now, I responded by pointing out
Speaker 2: that Juliani's time frame was a little off. Well, but
Speaker 2: I mean I was there in twenty fifteen, and my
Speaker 2: friends who were in the Ukrainian military were still fighting
Speaker 2: under Trump. You know, the invasion, Yeah, was still happening.
Speaker 2: It was just not at the current level that it's at.
Speaker 2: Rudy went on to blame Obama for not having given
Speaker 2: weapons to Ukraine in a timely fashion.
Speaker 6: The fact of Koroshenko, who is a corrupt pal of Biden's,
Speaker 6: told me that, yeah, they were my friends, but I
Speaker 6: didn't get any guns until Trump came in. They wanted
Speaker 6: me to win with t shootings and stuff.
Speaker 8: He said.
Speaker 6: I didn't have a new what side they were on.
Speaker 6: Obama never gave them alls. He gave them money.
Speaker 2: Now, this is again not accurate. By December of twenty nineteen,
Speaker 2: the US had provided Ukraine with about one point five
Speaker 2: billion dollars in aid since the twenty fourteen invasion. This
Speaker 2: did include weapons including javel in, anti tank missiles and
Speaker 2: armored vehicles, which is why they had some of these
Speaker 2: weapons win the expanded Russian invasion occurred. Rather than loosening
Speaker 2: the purse strings. As Russian aggression continued, President Trump withheld
Speaker 2: three hundred and ninety one million dollars in aid to
Speaker 2: try and get a political favor from Zelenski. We're going
Speaker 2: to continue with Rudy Giuliani and my conversation, but first
Speaker 2: here's a little bit more ads and we're back. So,
Speaker 2: after Juliani made his claim that the United States didn't
Speaker 2: send any weapons over to Ukraine until Trump was president,
Speaker 2: he said this, he.
Speaker 6: Let Biden handle the money, the last guy in the
Speaker 6: world that should be only money to Ukraine now and
Speaker 6: Ukraine's gotten two hundred billion and nobody let us order it.
Speaker 6: This is the acknowledge to be the seconds most corrupt
Speaker 6: country in the world. The fact that they were invaded
Speaker 6: by Russia doesn't make them honest. It makes him the victim,
Speaker 6: doesn't make them honest. And you care a couple hundred
Speaker 6: billion in there without controls? What am I a jackass?
Speaker 6: I can't figure out what's happening, and you don't win
Speaker 6: now much more do you have? You can let's hunch a
Speaker 6: billion company.
Speaker 2: Now, Rudy like most Republicans on this issue always describes
Speaker 2: the aid we've sent to Ukraine as it's cash. I
Speaker 2: find it interesting that he claims Ukrainian corruption is also
Speaker 2: somehow to blame for US not auditing the aid we sent. Now,
Speaker 2: there are issues with how the US Defense Department has
Speaker 2: audited some of the aid going to Ukraine, but those
Speaker 2: are issues with the Defense Department. In fact, it came
Speaker 2: out in January of twenty twenty four that the United
Speaker 2: States failed to audit about a billion dollars worth of
Speaker 2: military aid to Ukraine. Now, first off, this is not cash,
Speaker 2: as Juliani repeatedly insinuates. It's all weapons, and there's no
Speaker 2: evidence that any of these weapons were ever sold to
Speaker 2: another kind of or used outside of Ukraine. They simply
Speaker 2: weren't audited the way that they ought to have been
Speaker 2: because the Pentagon fired all of the people who should
Speaker 2: have been auditing this aid. Right, this is a pretty
Speaker 2: common issue with the Pentagon. You can look back to
Speaker 2: Iraq and the sheer amount of aid that was sent
Speaker 2: to Iraq and then kind of disappeared in the ether
Speaker 2: because they just didn't have anyone paying attention to it. Obviously,
Speaker 2: because that happened under Republican administration. Juliani isn't concerned at
Speaker 2: all about it, but he is deeply concerned about this
Speaker 2: kind of fantastical two hundred billion dollars that he believes
Speaker 2: has been shotgunned out to Ukrainian mobsters. And here's Rudy again.
Speaker 2: As our conversation continued.
Speaker 6: Biden has us consigned to a war without animate in Ukraine.
Speaker 6: He doesn't even dare to suggest an end because he's
Speaker 6: afraid of confrontation with Russia.
Speaker 3: So he's just going to get more people killed.
Speaker 6: I mean, there probably isn't an American president that's that
Speaker 6: more people killed other than an a war than Biden.
Speaker 2: It's interesting you describe it as them not winning, because
Speaker 2: I do have trouble. I know. In the lead up
Speaker 2: to the expanded invasion of February twenty twenty two, the
Speaker 2: expectation from most of the people in our military and
Speaker 2: most people internationally was that the Ukrainian military was going
Speaker 2: to fold in a manner of days. And they're now
Speaker 2: back to about seventeen percent of the country under Russian occupation,
Speaker 2: which isn't a massive escalation over where it was previously
Speaker 2: because they pushed well because they pushed the Russians out
Speaker 2: of Kiev.
Speaker 3: Well, will that end the war?
Speaker 7: Russia can keep seven pay percent.
Speaker 2: I don't think the Ukrainians are willing to send the
Speaker 2: war that woman.
Speaker 6: The war is one when you achieve the objective that
Speaker 6: has you stopped conducting war. They're not even close to them.
Speaker 6: The only way Ukraine says it will stop fighting is
Speaker 6: if Russia is pushed out of Ukraine. They haven't been
Speaker 6: able to do that. So they're not winning the war.
Speaker 6: I mean, nor are they presenting a plan that we're
Speaker 6: funding to do that. We're not planning, we're not funding.
Speaker 6: We're just endlessly giving them money to keep the status quoth.
Speaker 6: We do not have a plan to win them or
Speaker 6: end it.
Speaker 2: So I mean when I.
Speaker 6: Tom Towell used to say, the worst thing about American
Speaker 6: foreign policy under unrealistic, somewhat left leaning liberals is war
Speaker 6: without end. When you go into a war, you've got
Speaker 6: to be willing to commit yourself. You've got to be
Speaker 6: willing to win it quick, otherwise you're gonna lose. You know,
Speaker 6: when we started, when we started losing wars, got this policy,
Speaker 6: we fall.
Speaker 2: But if you if you compare where Ukraine is at
Speaker 2: right now to the wars in the United States has
Speaker 2: gotten involved in in this century. Iraq, you know, around
Speaker 2: a decade or so close to twenty years for Afghanistan.
Speaker 2: Ukraine is two years since the expanded invasion and kind
Speaker 2: of you know war. It's a it's a massive international
Speaker 2: conflict between a much smaller nation and a larger one.
Speaker 2: When I talk to Ukrainians and they I asked them,
Speaker 2: what do you think you need to actually win this?
Speaker 2: One of the things they repeatedly say is the ability
Speaker 2: to strike Russian assets inside Russia.
Speaker 8: Who doesn't give him? Who does? Who? Prem Yeah, I'm
Speaker 8: just one more minutes, we got to go.
Speaker 3: Who prevents that person? Definitely?
Speaker 2: The Biden administration hasn't allowed that.
Speaker 3: He tells us he wants them to win.
Speaker 8: Do you do you think why.
Speaker 2: Would you be supportive under a new Republican administration of
Speaker 2: allowing Ukraine to strike inside Russia?
Speaker 6: I would be supportive of sitting down and having a
Speaker 6: realistic conversation about a plan. First thing I do is
Speaker 6: all that the money we gave.
Speaker 2: Now, of course, Rudy can't support that, so he pivoted
Speaker 2: back to arguing that we need to audit Ukraine to
Speaker 2: quote find out what happened to the money we gave
Speaker 2: him him being Zelensky again, I pointed out that we
Speaker 2: aren't giving him money directly, we're sending over weapons. Nevertheless,
Speaker 2: our conversation continued. Now, the vast majority of the two
Speaker 2: hundred billion that's been sent over, though, is in munitions,
Speaker 2: Like we're not talking about have you have you found
Speaker 2: it in the American industry, but there has been American
Speaker 2: in the American industry.
Speaker 6: You want to defend the American military industrial bumble what
Speaker 6: I want to think there is a lot.
Speaker 7: Of weeks of money in the American It.
Speaker 2: Was very much Well, I'm not concerned about money though,
Speaker 2: because what.
Speaker 6: We have, the money doesn't get to that.
Speaker 2: There's no javelins winding up outside of Ukraine, there's no
Speaker 2: agtms winding up out money. They're they're mostly getting weaponry though,
Speaker 2: they're getting Bradley's, they're getting Abrams tanks, they're.
Speaker 6: Getting been on the market selling those things.
Speaker 2: Where have they sold them?
Speaker 6: They've been caught three times selling selling where selling weapons
Speaker 6: where I'd have to go back and look, they've been
Speaker 6: caught three times selling plus.
Speaker 2: They have Now this was just a lie Ukraine has
Speaker 2: not been caught selling US weapons. Rudy only claims they
Speaker 2: have been because he's consumed a huge amount of Krimlin
Speaker 2: funded media that has been arguing since twenty twenty two
Speaker 2: that US weapons sent to Ukraine will end up on
Speaker 2: the black market. There's no outside evidence that shows that
Speaker 2: this has happened, and in fact is yusuf. A research
Speaker 2: analyst for the security think tank the Stimson Center recently
Speaker 2: told Business Insider, I don't think we've seen any real diversion,
Speaker 2: particularly outside the country of weapons. That article continues. Pro
Speaker 2: Russian media has aired similar claims of a massed diversion
Speaker 2: of arms meant for the front line, some citing a
Speaker 2: retracted CBS report that included a source claiming only thirty
Speaker 2: percent of weapons sent to Ukraine made it to the battlefield.
Speaker 2: One conspiracy Inclined website, purportedly citing anonymous Ukrainians, claimed the
Speaker 2: weapons are stolen to such a degree that Ukraine as
Speaker 2: of August had already lost the war because of the
Speaker 2: black market diversion. Now, in the months since that claim
Speaker 2: was made that Ukraine had lost the war because they
Speaker 2: had given up all of their weapons. They took a
Speaker 2: bunch of those weapons and invaded Russia, punching a hole
Speaker 2: through their lines and taking a considerable amount of territory
Speaker 2: in the Kursk region, which they occupy to an extent today.
Speaker 2: As is always the case with guys like Julian, reality
Speaker 2: doesn't matter here. It's about repeating the same talking points
Speaker 2: until you get a journalist ignorant enough to take them
Speaker 2: as true. And it's the kind of thing where if
Speaker 2: you're not up on all of the different claims being
Speaker 2: made on the right and all of the claims about
Speaker 2: corruption and money being siphoned off and taken by mobsters,
Speaker 2: then you're not going to be able to properly argue
Speaker 2: with them, right Like, if you don't really know what
Speaker 2: you're talking about, you might seed the point to Juliani
Speaker 2: that there have been at least three cases of the
Speaker 2: Ukrainians caught selling American weapons overseas. Now, when you look
Speaker 2: into what you see that this is primarily a claim
Speaker 2: that spreads on right wing Facebook pages and there's not
Speaker 2: really any evidence of a sizable diversion. But that doesn't
Speaker 2: really matter. What matters is in the moment, being able
Speaker 2: to kind of spread a point out to the extent
Speaker 2: that nobody really questions you want it.
Speaker 3: And I don't know.
Speaker 2: It's the kind of thing that happens a lot in politics,
Speaker 2: and it's the kind of thing that is probably pointless
Speaker 2: to really address, right Like me arguing with Rudy Giuliani
Speaker 2: got him hot and flustered and kind of pissed off,
Speaker 2: and certainly me frustrated. But I don't think it accomplished much.
Speaker 2: And I really I think kind of the thing that
Speaker 2: you have to accept when you're looking at sort of
Speaker 2: right wing lies about what's happening in Ukraine or the
Speaker 2: lies being told right now about you know, Springfield, Ohio
Speaker 2: and the Haitian migrant population over there, there's really a
Speaker 2: very little point in actually confronting these people directly about
Speaker 2: the disinformation that they put out, because it's not really
Speaker 2: a case where they care about the truth one way
Speaker 2: or the other. It's a matter of you've kind of
Speaker 2: lost the fight if you care at all about trying
Speaker 2: to prove reality to them, you know. And that's kind
Speaker 2: of a bummer note to end this on. But I
Speaker 2: guess I don't really have anything optimistic to say. I
Speaker 2: just thought you'd be interested in my little conversation with
Speaker 2: Rudy Giuliani and some of the talking points that are
Speaker 2: continuing to spread up along the right. So you know,
Speaker 2: at the very least, maybe the next time you wind
Speaker 2: up in an argument this Thanksgiving with your uncle Ukraine,
Speaker 2: you'll be kind of wary for some of the arguments
Speaker 2: he's going to bring out, you know, to the extent
Speaker 2: that that does anybody any good until next time. I'm
Speaker 2: Robert Evans and this is It Could Happen Here. If
Speaker 2: you want to see these sources for this episode and
Speaker 2: do some reading yourself, they're in the show notes, so
Speaker 2: just check them out there and we will be back tomorrow.
Speaker 9: Welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Garrison Davis.
Speaker 9: I am joined by James Stout and Nia Wong to
Speaker 9: talk about some of our favorite people to hate, the
Speaker 9: Heritage Foundation.
Speaker 3: Hello everybody, Hi Garrison.
Speaker 4: Hello, Oh god, I got brought in talked with the
Speaker 4: Heritage Foundation.
Speaker 3: Oh no, what a week? What a week?
Speaker 9: So I mean, people have been talking a lot about
Speaker 9: the Heritage Foundations Project twenty twenty five because it is
Speaker 9: a massive, massive document that is honestly too long to
Speaker 9: actually read, but it does it does focus on LGBTQ
Speaker 9: issues for a decent a decent chunk of the book,
Speaker 9: mainly finding different ways to both legalize and protect discrimination
Speaker 9: against LGBTQ people and like banning the public presence of
Speaker 9: LGBTQ materials deemed deemed pornographic in public life, especially schools, libraries,
Speaker 9: all that.
Speaker 3: Kind of stuff.
Speaker 9: Right, It's kind of this this nationwide don't say gay
Speaker 9: bill type thing, along with legalizing and protecting people's people's
Speaker 9: right to discriminate against for people. So that's kind of
Speaker 9: the bulk of the of the of the tactics that
Speaker 9: are laid out in the Heritage Foundation's Project twenty twenty five.
Speaker 9: But Trump and a whole bunch of Republicans have been
Speaker 9: doing a lot of work to distance themselves from this document.
Speaker 9: At the RNC, I was kind of surprised that, like,
Speaker 9: I did not hear a single, a single mention of
Speaker 9: Project twenty twenty five unless I was the one to
Speaker 9: bring it up when talking with people.
Speaker 3: They didn't.
Speaker 9: They didn't like talking about it because they know it's
Speaker 9: kind of just like this toxic thing now. They kind
Speaker 9: they kind of showed their power level to use to
Speaker 9: use an ancient phrase.
Speaker 4: Yeah, who could possibly have guessed for the document where
Speaker 4: they talk about bringing back the gold standard was going
Speaker 4: to be unpopular with literally everyone, including their own base.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I mean, I don't think that's the reason why
Speaker 9: it's unpopular. I think it's all of like the dictator
Speaker 9: fascism stuff. But the gold standard bit's pretty funny. Even
Speaker 9: at the Heritage Foundation booth, not a peep about Project
Speaker 9: twenty twenty five. It's like the biggest thing they've done
Speaker 9: in like the in the last decade, arguably not a
Speaker 9: single peep. But they did have a whole bunch of
Speaker 9: other like merch, a whole bunch of little pamphlets, papers.
Speaker 9: I love papers. I love little documents, some little ephemera
Speaker 9: to de femera. Yeah, I love collecting all this little stuff.
Speaker 9: And it just sits on a pile on my desk
Speaker 9: for like, way too long. And in this case, it's
Speaker 9: set on a pile on my desk for about two
Speaker 9: months and the pile became too big and too unruly.
Speaker 9: And now we're going to actually go through the pile
Speaker 9: of stuff, right and talk about the types of things
Speaker 9: that the Heritage Foundation actually did have out on their table,
Speaker 9: specifically relating to gender identity. Oh good, which is their
Speaker 9: term of choice for these issues. Now, like gender identity
Speaker 9: quote unquote transgenderism were frequent talking points at the Republican
Speaker 9: National Convention, way more so than the Democratic National Convention,
Speaker 9: in which they were kind of just brushed aside as
Speaker 9: a political inconvenience. But at the R and C these
Speaker 9: things were front and center. Almost every single person giving
Speaker 9: a speech on the main stage at least name dropped
Speaker 9: gender ideology in some way to receive thunderous applause from
Speaker 9: the crowd. So it certainly was a very common topic
Speaker 9: brought up. And here's what the actual literature that was
Speaker 9: proliferating at the event had to say about it.
Speaker 3: So let's let's start.
Speaker 9: Let's start penphlet number one, how to speak up about
Speaker 9: gender identity, questions and answers driving the debate, So it's
Speaker 9: a debate, is the first thing we want we need
Speaker 9: to know about gender identity? Again, I'm not just reading
Speaker 9: out all of their propaganda. I think there is some
Speaker 9: use in actually learning what they're saying in like their
Speaker 9: biggest convention and then actually not like debunking, because like,
Speaker 9: come on, I know who our audience is. But at
Speaker 9: least actually laying out what they're saying and how it
Speaker 9: relates to like the actual information I think does does
Speaker 9: have sub use. So I will I will be quoting
Speaker 9: from the Heritage Foundation saying some pretty stupid things, but
Speaker 9: then we will kind of springboard discussion, and I do
Speaker 9: have some some little fact checks on some of the
Speaker 9: like these very common lies that you're now seeing like
Speaker 9: get repeated so often you may be trying to be
Speaker 9: tricked into thinking that they are real. So we're going
Speaker 9: to tackle the quote unquote the big questions. What are sex,
Speaker 9: gender and gender identity. I'm sure this five page pamphlet
Speaker 9: will tell me all I need to know about the
Speaker 9: topics of what our sex, gender, gender identity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I can't wait to learn they figured it out,
Speaker 3: They figured it out.
Speaker 9: There's this centuries long discussions have been haven't resolved. What
Speaker 9: do gender dysporia and transgender mean? And how do gender
Speaker 9: identity policies affect me and my community? I think this
Speaker 9: is largely targeted towards like I mean, it's turned towards
Speaker 9: people at the RNC, so like people in like their sixties,
Speaker 9: like like grandparents.
Speaker 10: Yeah, is this so how to talk to your friend
Speaker 10: about the transgenders.
Speaker 9: But kind of kind of it's more so like, oh no,
Speaker 9: your grandkids are maybe a little gay with it, grandchild?
Speaker 9: Exactly what does that mean? What is that about? I
Speaker 9: think that's kind of what the main the main demographic is. Okay, anyway,
Speaker 9: here we go. The common understanding that there are only
Speaker 9: two sexes and human beings male and female, determined by
Speaker 9: each person's biology, has been the cultural norm and the
Speaker 9: basis for our laws since our nation's founding it, though,
Speaker 9: has it that's a good question.
Speaker 10: I'm not going to do this because I go fund
Speaker 10: will take fucking an hour, but this isn't true.
Speaker 9: It will and obviously they're not going to mention intersex people.
Speaker 9: They're not going to mention any any of that stuff.
Speaker 10: Yeah, or that like every indigenous culture has multiple gender words.
Speaker 3: Yeah no, no, no, no, we'll just leave that out.
Speaker 9: Because only recently have we seen a shift away from
Speaker 9: this objective and scientific no citation understanding towards an ideology
Speaker 9: that says a person's gender is determined by what they
Speaker 9: believe they are parenthesis gender identity rather than their biological sex,
Speaker 9: and should be legally recognized. The transgender movement has rapidly
Speaker 9: advanced laws and policies that give special rights and protections
Speaker 9: to some people while infringing on the rights of others. Now,
Speaker 9: this is this is a talking point that was brought
Speaker 9: up a lot when I was a kid around trans people.
Speaker 9: How they have special laws that give them more rights
Speaker 9: than your average person. And that's why, like a good
Speaker 9: like conservative basis should be opposed to them, even if
Speaker 9: you're like, you know, an accepting you may not like
Speaker 9: agree with them, but you're not going to kill them,
Speaker 9: but they shouldn't have like extra rights. That was that
Speaker 9: was a big thing, is framing things that either protect
Speaker 9: trans people from discrimination or framing things that ensure their
Speaker 9: healthcare as like special extra rights not provided to like
Speaker 9: regular regular Americans.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is like a huge thing with just the
Speaker 4: basis of all political conservatism is they all believe that,
Speaker 4: like like they all believe that immigrants have like a
Speaker 4: secret healthcare system that they have access to, and that
Speaker 4: like black people have like welfare, and that like indigenous
Speaker 4: people get into schools for free.
Speaker 10: And it's just like yep, no, it's all based on
Speaker 10: never talking to anyone who isn't like you.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 9: In addressing the conflicts that emerge. In addressing the conflicts that.
Speaker 3: Emerge, what are you talking about?
Speaker 9: The government must protect everyone's rights and fundamental freedoms. The
Speaker 9: introduction of the concept of gender identity into recent legislation
Speaker 9: raises concerns about privacy, safety, fairness, liberty, and its impact
Speaker 9: on children. It threatens the freedom of religion and conscience.
Speaker 3: What the freedom of conscience? What does that mean?
Speaker 9: Because it's not just a religious objection. My conscience tells
Speaker 9: me that trans people are icky, tells me I should
Speaker 9: have this person's house. Does that let me have it?
Speaker 3: I mean it should yeah.
Speaker 10: Yeah, yeah, My conscience tells me a whole lot of shit.
Speaker 10: It means you can't not like trans people. The government's
Speaker 10: going to come for you if you don't like trans people.
Speaker 10: Is that what they mean?
Speaker 9: I think they are legitimately scared of that. Yeah. But
Speaker 9: it also threatens freedom of speech, equal protection, and parental rights.
Speaker 9: This radical redefinition of sex could dramatically alter our society,
Speaker 9: creating significant disadvantages for some, particularly women and girls. Okay,
Speaker 9: all right, so there we go. That's that's that is.
Speaker 9: That is the introduction. Now onto page two. All individuals
Speaker 9: have human dignity and should be treated with respect citation needed,
Speaker 9: including those who identify as transgender and knowe. They're very
Speaker 9: careful to never actually say trans people are transgender people.
Speaker 9: There's people who identify transgender, and there's there's transgender activists
Speaker 9: and gender ideology activists. They take great care to never
Speaker 9: actually say trans people are doing this. They say transactivists
Speaker 9: are doing this increases degree of separation. That that's one
Speaker 9: kind of a little rhetorical tactic that I noticed when
Speaker 9: first looking through this.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think there's this also kind of a lake
Speaker 4: see of this sort of trans tipping point and how
Speaker 4: accepted things had gotten. We're like, I remember this with
Speaker 4: like Alex Jones in like like even like twenty twenty two,
Speaker 4: twenty twenty three would say, like the most transphobic thing
Speaker 4: you've ever heard, but it would be prefaced with some
Speaker 4: trans people or fine people.
Speaker 3: I don't mean this.
Speaker 9: Toage people then say like, yeah, coming to rape your
Speaker 9: dog or something.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, anyway.
Speaker 9: But by labeling realistic concerns and scientific objections as oppressive,
Speaker 9: transgender activists have shut down open, robust dialogue over the
Speaker 9: consequences of gender ideology and gender identity policies. The serious
Speaker 9: real world effects of gender identity policies on individuals and
Speaker 9: communities must be taken into consideration. Many treatments promoted by
Speaker 9: transgender activists are untested, can cause serious side effects and
Speaker 9: come with irreversible developmental consequences when performed on children. So
Speaker 9: this is my first kind of pause, because this is
Speaker 9: a claim that we've been seeing, i would say, at
Speaker 9: an increasing rate ever since Matt Walsh's documentary. This was
Speaker 9: like one thing that he really tried to like invent
Speaker 9: specifically that like quote unquote like puberty blockers cause like sterilization.
Speaker 9: I'm like, yeah, you can't reproduce when you're on them, obviously,
Speaker 9: but you can when you go off them. But that's
Speaker 9: something that like they never talk about. They frame it
Speaker 9: as like this permanent thing. Samantha Rosenthal has an opendent
Speaker 9: piece in the La Times that talks about like the
Speaker 9: very long history of trans healthcare in the United States.
Speaker 9: Modern trans healthcare goes back to the nineteen sixties, and
Speaker 9: hormone therapy has been used to assist cisgender children in
Speaker 9: puberty since at least the nineteen forties. These these things
Speaker 9: are not untested, These are medical practices with a long
Speaker 9: history and saying that there's there's irreversible developmental consequences when
Speaker 9: performed on children, Like the FDA approved hormone blockers for
Speaker 9: children back in nineteen ninety three. We have been using
Speaker 9: these for for quite a long time, and these false
Speaker 9: claims are actually seeing some like significant harm. I'm gonna
Speaker 9: quote from ABC News here.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 9: England's National Health Service has banned the use of puberty
Speaker 9: blockers for the treatment of gendernus for you, or gender
Speaker 9: incongruence in transgender minors. The NHS has not stated it
Speaker 9: will restrict puberty blockers for non transgender children and young people.
Speaker 9: An NHS spokesperson told ABC News the agency hopes to
Speaker 9: have a study into the use of puberty blockers in
Speaker 9: place by December of this year, with eligibility criteria yet
Speaker 9: to be decided unquote. So they are just like starting
Speaker 9: to ban these, and of course we've seen this in
Speaker 9: the United States as well, but this is like the
Speaker 9: National Health Service, this is like a really a really
Speaker 9: big organization that's only banning it for trans people, not
Speaker 9: versus gender children.
Speaker 6: Yep.
Speaker 3: So like it's really devastating.
Speaker 4: I think it's important to note too, that this is
Speaker 4: the exact one of the exact same lines that anti
Speaker 4: vaxxers use, and you know that's anti vax campaigns have
Speaker 4: been a lot of those sort of model for how
Speaker 4: how attax and transalth care works. But like, yeah, this
Speaker 4: is this is literally the lie that these same people
Speaker 4: we'll say about vaccines. It's like, oh, the RNA vaccine
Speaker 4: is like an untested Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: We tested it a motion of the population and everyone's fine.
Speaker 10: So you know, I did a clinical trial for COVID
Speaker 10: vaccines before they were really suited thousands of other people.
Speaker 4: Yeah no.
Speaker 9: And in terms of puberty blockers, these have been used
Speaker 9: and tested for decades. Like these are not a new technology.
Speaker 4: It's even funnier because again it's like, well, well, okay,
Speaker 4: so like we will give them to CIS children.
Speaker 3: End with this stuff.
Speaker 9: It shows I think it is I'm I read one
Speaker 9: other quote from a SABC article quote The Endocrine Society
Speaker 9: and a national organization of more than eighteen thousand endercronologists,
Speaker 9: calls the medication quote unquote fully reversible. Once blockers are stopped,
Speaker 9: puberty continues with little to no proven side effects. According
Speaker 9: to health professionals, unquote. And there was a recent study
Speaker 9: in twenty twenty two in the journal Jama which found
Speaker 9: the use of puberty blocking drugs did not lead to
Speaker 9: an increased chance of receiving gender affirmat therapy in the future,
Speaker 9: and actually we're slightly less likely to given the extra
Speaker 9: time to explore gender in the body without the onset
Speaker 9: of irreversible effects of puberty. Possible bone density losses largely
Speaker 9: remediated upon the presence of sex hormones, whether from either
Speaker 9: just ceasing the blockers or starting HRT. And this study
Speaker 9: also says at the end that perhaps we should just
Speaker 9: stop using the term puberty blocker, because it makes it
Speaker 9: sound like it just completely blocks puberty, like from ever happening,
Speaker 9: Like it just is like now you don't go through puberty. Yeah,
Speaker 9: And instead opts to say, like, maybe we should just
Speaker 9: describe what the drug does mechanistically and clinically, because maybe
Speaker 9: maybe puberty blockers is just a it implies something more
Speaker 9: than what the drug actually like does temporarily. Yeah. So
Speaker 9: I found that to be an interesting note. And the
Speaker 9: whole point of and this something we'll probably talk about later.
Speaker 9: The whole point of this drug is so that you
Speaker 9: can have more time to actually decide what you want
Speaker 9: to do with your body and your gender. And most
Speaker 9: people that do go on on blockers, with whether SIS
Speaker 9: or not, are doing it to prevent irreversible changes from huberty,
Speaker 9: and most people opt to not actually go on cross
Speaker 9: sex hormones. And that's like a successful treatment like that
Speaker 9: is that that is what the drug is supposed to do.
Speaker 9: But there's definitely this idea among these like anti transactivists
Speaker 9: that like, if you go on blockers, that means you're
Speaker 9: more likely to become quote unquote like fully trends in
Speaker 9: the future, which also just like isn't true.
Speaker 3: But do you know what is reversible?
Speaker 4: Not liking their products and services and support this podcast.
Speaker 9: You can you can reverse that and make it so
Speaker 9: you really like them, which helps us a little bit.
Speaker 9: Probably I assume I don't know. I think so, I don't.
Speaker 9: I don't I don't do the business thing.
Speaker 3: Anyway. Here are the ads. Okay, we are back.
Speaker 9: Let let's continue this fine literature from our good enemies
Speaker 9: at the Heritage Foundation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, great art and layout. As what I'm noticing it
Speaker 3: it is it is very well designed.
Speaker 9: Yeah, there's these there are some children, these poor kids,
Speaker 9: these poor stock photos of children.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure they gave the heartfelt consent
Speaker 10: to being used in it hate propaganda.
Speaker 9: The next section is called what are sex, gender, and
Speaker 9: gender identity? The best biology, psychology, and philosophy. All support
Speaker 9: and understanding that sex is of bodily reality and that
Speaker 9: gender is a social manifestation of bodily sex.
Speaker 3: The best biology.
Speaker 9: That's simply the best philosophy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh my god.
Speaker 9: Now this claim actually does have a citation, so it's true. Now,
Speaker 9: let me check the citation. The citation is oh oh
Speaker 9: oh wait, wait wait oh, the citation is when Harry
Speaker 9: became Sally responding to the transgender movement the Anti trans
Speaker 9: Book of two eighteen by Ryan T.
Speaker 3: Anderson.
Speaker 9: Oh god, that's not a real philosophy, biology, or psychology book.
Speaker 10: Oh okay, well he won best Philosopher anyway, I don't
Speaker 10: know what you're talking about.
Speaker 9: The best all agree, that's so good now. Sex sex
Speaker 9: is a biological reality referring to an organism's overall organization
Speaker 9: towards sexual reproduction in human beings, just like every other
Speaker 9: species that sexually reproduces. This organism includes the chromosomes we
Speaker 9: inherit from our parents and the reproductive organs systems natalia
Speaker 9: and hormones that developed as a consequence. As there are
Speaker 9: two reproductive systems, there are two sexes, just like every
Speaker 9: other species that sexually reproduces. This is completely consistent. I
Speaker 9: get no citation because that's not That is not how
Speaker 9: biology actually works. No, nor is your Italian necessarily determined
Speaker 9: by your chromosomes. Nope, but sure, why not? The best
Speaker 9: biology all support this understanding? Yeah, yeah, the.
Speaker 3: Best biology from a first grade textbook.
Speaker 4: Actually, that's unfair to first grade textbooks, which are largely
Speaker 4: blameless in this matter.
Speaker 3: It is. It is unfair.
Speaker 10: Yeah, No, one's sticking genitalia in a first grade textbook.
Speaker 9: This organization isn't just the best way to figure out
Speaker 9: which sex you are, it's the only way to make
Speaker 9: sense of the concepts of male and female.
Speaker 3: Really really yeah, the only way. Yeah.
Speaker 9: What an interesting sociological statement made by the Heritage Foundation. Yeah,
Speaker 9: that the only differences are purely mechanistical and there really
Speaker 9: is no social basis that determines what the concepts in
Speaker 9: male and female relate to. What an interesting opinion that
Speaker 9: I'm sure is consistent across all of the heritage foundations.
Speaker 10: And yeah, it's going to say, you can pull out
Speaker 10: another booklet and call them on their ship with their words.
Speaker 9: Gender, by contrast, is the way one expresses their biological sex.
Speaker 9: We shouldn't pretend that there are no differences between male
Speaker 9: and female, because biological reality is that there are. We
Speaker 9: also shouldn't be trapped in rigid gender stereotypes. Transgender activists
Speaker 9: deny that sex is a bodily reality. They argue one
Speaker 9: it's perceived gender identity represents to a person really is,
Speaker 9: even if it goes against their biological sex. They deny
Speaker 9: their biological reality by suggesting that biological sex is merely
Speaker 9: assigned at birth. A little known fun fact, you actually
Speaker 9: can like scientifically change your biological sex. Yeah, rules, it
Speaker 9: takes a little bit of time, it takes a little
Speaker 9: bit of effort, but your biological sex can actually just
Speaker 9: be like completely changed. This is something that is not
Speaker 9: like set.
Speaker 4: Also, there is literally there is literally physically a document
Speaker 4: where your doctor assigns.
Speaker 3: You a sex at birth. I come on, yeah, no,
Speaker 3: it is a box that they must take.
Speaker 10: It's not even like not a line that they get
Speaker 10: to write in whatever they want, you know, like.
Speaker 9: But the cool thing is is that when you change
Speaker 9: with sex hormones your body is dominant in it actually
Speaker 9: changes the sex and the functions of your body. Pretty
Speaker 9: interesting stuff. Actually, I don't care about my chromosomes, but
Speaker 9: as soon as we want to do more gene tampering,
Speaker 9: I guess that that could be fun, but I don't
Speaker 9: really care. You can also change body parts, so that's cool.
Speaker 9: I know they're working on those womb transplants, but I'm
Speaker 9: not into that freaky stuff anyway. According to the American
Speaker 9: Psychological Association, gender identity refers to a person's internal sense
Speaker 9: of being male, female, or something else. Hey, something else nice.
Speaker 9: It is distinct from either sex or gender activists claim
Speaker 9: it is a person's internal sense of gender activists claim.
Speaker 9: They also assert that it's more than just male or female.
Speaker 9: It's fluid and there's a spectrum of various options beyond
Speaker 9: man and woman, like gender fluid, intern gender, or non binary.
Speaker 3: I've never heard the term intergender before. That's yeah, that's
Speaker 3: it's a new one.
Speaker 10: Well, I guess if thatnoledge the existence of intersex people,
Speaker 10: that kind of fucks up the premise of the whole thing.
Speaker 3: No, this is intergen Maybe.
Speaker 4: That's what Yeah, but again, maybe maybe that's what it is.
Speaker 4: They can't say intersect. Yeah, it destroys their whole ship.
Speaker 4: So they've transposed intersex.
Speaker 9: Is it like an identity, it's like an actual, like
Speaker 9: completely like medical thing.
Speaker 10: I don't think that they fully understand this shit, Garrison.
Speaker 9: I think it's it's you're right, You're sorry. Sorry, I forgot.
Speaker 9: I'm reading from a heritage, but.
Speaker 10: Maybe coming from a place of hate.
Speaker 9: All right, let's let's talk about gender dysphoria now. Let's
Speaker 9: Dysphoria refers to the distress someone experiences when they have
Speaker 9: a disconnection between their bodily, sex, and internal sense of gender.
Speaker 9: The diagnostic label gender entity disorder was used by the
Speaker 9: DSM until it's reclassification as a gender dysphoria in twenty
Speaker 9: thirteen with the release of the DSM five. They really
Speaker 9: want that old DSM back. They want it back before
Speaker 9: the DSM went woke. They really want DSM four. Transgender
Speaker 9: can refer to a man who identifies as a woman
Speaker 9: or a woman who identifies as man some activists.
Speaker 3: Some activists go so far as.
Speaker 9: To say that a trans woman is a woman crazy.
Speaker 9: Not all people who suffer from gender and dysphoria identify
Speaker 9: as transgender, and not everyone who dentifies the transgender sefer
Speaker 9: from gender dysphoria. Surprisingly woke statement. It's a surprisingly controversial
Speaker 9: and woke statement from Heritage Foundation here, anti transmend anti
Speaker 9: truthcum Air foundation. What the fuck base, it's the seven
Speaker 9: people who get that, you're welcome for everyone else.
Speaker 3: I swear to God, that's very funny. It's it's a
Speaker 3: little funny. Oh the funny.
Speaker 9: I was workshopping some kind of like Tumblr post style joke.
Speaker 9: But this I still have like two pages of this pamphlet.
Speaker 9: So now, how do gender identity policies affect me and
Speaker 9: my community? The question on every Republican grandparents' mind. The
Speaker 9: first area of concern privacy. Privacy concerns arise when a
Speaker 9: men who identify you as women can enter female only spaces,
Speaker 9: for example, changing rooms, gym class. They're doing bathroom stuff,
Speaker 9: that's what they're doing. The reason we have separate facilities
Speaker 9: in the first place is not because of a gender identity,
Speaker 9: but because of the bodily difference between males and females.
Speaker 3: That's interesting.
Speaker 9: I wonder what happens when some of those bodily differences
Speaker 9: start to change, or your social rules of male and
Speaker 9: female also change, like a young trans girl going into
Speaker 9: the men's bathroom that could maybe be a little bit
Speaker 9: uncomfortable anyway.
Speaker 3: Preventing sexual assault is another.
Speaker 9: Major area of concern when gender identity determines who may
Speaker 9: enter a women only space. Public safety X efforts such
Speaker 9: as Kenneth V. Lanning, former FBI Supervisory Special Agent assigned
Speaker 9: to the Behavioral Science Unit.
Speaker 3: They're doing the Buffalo Bill.
Speaker 9: At the National Center for the Analysis Violent Crime at
Speaker 9: the FBI Academy for over twenty years. It is just
Speaker 9: the Buffalo bill. Guy explains that predators abuse gender and
Speaker 9: the policies to gain access to victims, while victims law
Speaker 9: enforcement become less likely to report incidents for fear of
Speaker 9: having misunderstood and being accused of discrimination. The primary concern
Speaker 9: is not that people who identify as transgender will victimize women,
Speaker 9: but that predators will exploit gender identity policies to do so.
Speaker 9: So this is interesting. They're actually not doing all trans
Speaker 9: women are secretly rapists. They are doing what is actually
Speaker 9: more like more legit is that no like men will
Speaker 9: be fucked up and men will like do fucked up shit.
Speaker 9: The thing is, they don't need those policies to do
Speaker 9: fucked up shit. Men will do it regardless.
Speaker 4: Wait, you are the Herod Foundation, Your your base, your
Speaker 4: entire base are chuck is composed of churches who do
Speaker 4: this literally every day, Like, come on, what are we
Speaker 4: doing here?
Speaker 3: But you find it interesting that they take this line
Speaker 3: of approach.
Speaker 4: I will say, this pamphlet feels like a much more
Speaker 4: sort of moderate So this feels like a gateway thing
Speaker 4: versus like the stuff that they're stuff that they actually believe,
Speaker 4: or like the sort of like more hardcore stuff that
Speaker 4: they they distribute.
Speaker 9: Well, I'm not sure how to how to segue to
Speaker 9: an ad break from this one. I'll be honest.
Speaker 3: You know what else the Heritage Foundation supports?
Speaker 9: Oh well that only is true capitalism and these ads
Speaker 9: that help fuel the turning machine of death and suffering.
Speaker 9: Hah Okay, we are back. Let's talk about fairness. Gender
Speaker 9: identity creates an unfairness when biological males biological males compete
Speaker 9: against females in sports and other activities. It also reduces
Speaker 9: girl chances of winning athletic scholarships.
Speaker 10: Yeah, the other fucking title nine defense every.
Speaker 9: Time scholar I'm sure all those trends girls are taken
Speaker 9: of all the scholarships.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Just let's just see where the Heritage Foundation stood on
Speaker 10: fucking Title nine, shall we when that came in. I'm
Speaker 10: sure they were totally supportive.
Speaker 9: Already, several high school girls have lost state championships is
Speaker 9: to quote unquote boys who were allowed to compete against them.
Speaker 9: These two boys have won fifteen girls state championships that
Speaker 9: were held up by ten females in the previous year.
Speaker 9: I tried to search some of these keywords to find
Speaker 9: exactly what they were talking about. The first result was
Speaker 9: from the reputable news publication, the Daily Signal, which is
Speaker 9: a Heritage Foundation puppet site. The article is just listing
Speaker 9: like a handful of like trans girls across the country
Speaker 9: who participated in school sports.
Speaker 3: And that's like, that's like all it is.
Speaker 9: And then of particular interest to James this next sentence, Oh, god,
Speaker 9: man who entifies some transgender Well, that's that's an interesting one.
Speaker 9: A man whoifies as a transgender has also won the
Speaker 9: women's cycling World's title.
Speaker 10: I know who they're talking about here. This is someone
Speaker 10: called for Runica Ivy. She was formerly known as Rachel
Speaker 10: McKinnon when she won the world title. Okay, she won
Speaker 10: a UCI Women's Master's Track World Championship. If you want
Speaker 10: to find an event where gender affirming hormones are used
Speaker 10: on a regular basis, I suggest you check out the
Speaker 10: Men's Masters World Track Championship because every fucking year one
Speaker 10: of those dudes gets popped for using testosterone, and like,
Speaker 10: I don't see that in the Heritage Foundation's complaints, Like
Speaker 10: this is just asshole, really, they've she has been a
Speaker 10: particular target for these people. Cycling has been a particular
Speaker 10: target for these people for a very long time, and
Speaker 10: it's very funny that they continue to like put out
Speaker 10: this propaganda which completely misunderstands, like the things that let
Speaker 10: you win the Master's Track World Championship are having money
Speaker 10: and having time. Like it is inherently unfair. It's it's
Speaker 10: a hobby sport right thirty five to forty four. There
Speaker 10: are not professional athletes in that age group like the
Speaker 10: people doing this. So the people who have the time
Speaker 10: and the money, they buy the fancy bikes, they travel
Speaker 10: to the race. It's if you care, if you care
Speaker 10: about fairness in masters cycling, there are a million other
Speaker 10: places to go after it.
Speaker 3: This is bullshit.
Speaker 9: Well it's so, it's so transparent because now the biggest
Speaker 9: trans sports controversy has been over a cisgender woman who
Speaker 9: just is appearing too masculine, right, Like, like the biggest,
Speaker 9: the biggest controversy in this whole trans women and sports
Speaker 9: thing at the Olympics ear earlier this year is just
Speaker 9: actually assis gender woman.
Speaker 10: Yeah, but that's the whole thing, right, Like policing the
Speaker 10: way people present their gender is what this is about
Speaker 10: for them.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and they're willing to throw anyone under the bus
Speaker 9: as long as it like puts forward like whatever disinformation
Speaker 9: they want, with the sole purpose of just changing public opinion,
Speaker 9: not actually like caring about any of the people involved.
Speaker 10: Here, Yeah, but like a return to like I don't
Speaker 10: even think traditional gender roles, but like, let's just say
Speaker 10: nineteen thirties gender roles, not even nineteen thirties, right, there
Speaker 10: were women fighting in the Spanishil War in the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 4: Victorian England gender roles.
Speaker 10: Yeah, totally, like it is what they want, and like
Speaker 10: they're not throwing emonically funded a bus so much she
Speaker 10: is part of a target because she's not a girly
Speaker 10: enough girl. Right, she's a woman who punches other people
Speaker 10: in the face, and like that's not collateral damage to me.
Speaker 10: Like that is part of their thing, right, it's not
Speaker 10: coincidental that it was a box set.
Speaker 3: It's part of their larger political project.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And obviously it's also their conception of womanhood is
Speaker 4: also highly racialized. Yes, obvious reasons.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it's not coincidental there's an African woman, right.
Speaker 9: No, many of the transgirls who are listed in the
Speaker 9: Daily Signal article, or transgirls of color. Yeah, that is
Speaker 9: who they're going after. They're going after like the most
Speaker 9: oppressed person and you can be in the country.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Now on onto one of our final chapters, How transgenderism
Speaker 9: affects your personal liberty.
Speaker 3: Transgenderism, that's the good to one.
Speaker 9: Transgender policies also violate our freedom speech and freedom of
Speaker 9: conscience by forcing people to speak or act in ways
Speaker 9: contrary to their personal judgment and deeply held beliefs. In
Speaker 9: New York City, you can be fined up to two
Speaker 9: hundred and fifty thousand dollars for misgendering.
Speaker 3: What's the citation that they do have a citation? Okay,
Speaker 3: hit me.
Speaker 9: They do go to the NYC Commission, and this isn't true.
Speaker 9: Despite the citation, they're trying to take like a city
Speaker 9: ordinance and twist it to make it sound like you
Speaker 9: will be fined a quarter of a million dollars for
Speaker 9: calling some of the wrong pronouns. And that's not where
Speaker 9: the audience is. Yeah, it's employment law, right, correct. It
Speaker 9: was first written in the early two thousands. It was
Speaker 9: then revised in twenty fifteen. I'm going to quote from
Speaker 9: Snopes quote discrimination it gets a transgender individual could resultant
Speaker 9: finds to up to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,
Speaker 9: But these fines won't be handed out for acidentally misusing pronouns.
Speaker 9: According to the new guidelines, the Commission can impose civil
Speaker 9: penalties up to one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars
Speaker 9: for violations of the law, and, in extreme circumstances, two
Speaker 9: hundred and fifty thousand for violations that are the result
Speaker 9: of willful, wanton, and malicious conduct. Yeah, this is for
Speaker 9: like employment discrimination.
Speaker 4: Yeah, employment discrimination happens literally all the time, and it
Speaker 4: never there's almost ever.
Speaker 3: Consequences for it. Yeah, but that's where this number comes from.
Speaker 10: Right, And it's completely misleading to suggest it like the
Speaker 10: work police to get to find you.
Speaker 9: Correct, And it's not for misusing pronouns. It's for like
Speaker 9: extreme cases of like continuous harassment or like like like
Speaker 9: legal discrimination. The next sentence is, quote, both a high
Speaker 9: school teacher and a college professor have been sanctioned by
Speaker 9: their employers for using biologically correct terms with their students.
Speaker 3: Did Jordan Peterson?
Speaker 9: Now, obviously those terms are not biologically correct because you
Speaker 9: can scientifically change your biological sex. And what they're talking
Speaker 9: about here is no just teachers who are just like
Speaker 9: harassing their students, who are like calling them by like
Speaker 9: the wrong name, calling them by the wrong pronouns. Like
Speaker 9: if you did that like assist person over time, Yeah,
Speaker 9: you would also get in trouble because that's just like harassment.
Speaker 10: Yeah yeah, And like you're just a shit teacher. If
Speaker 10: you're fucking going after your students for who they are,
Speaker 10: then yeah, you probably shouldn't be a teacher.
Speaker 9: They then talk about how transactivists are trying to get
Speaker 9: medical providers to provide like gender affirming healthcare. They're complaining
Speaker 9: how how Catholic hospitals are getting in trouble for not
Speaker 9: wanting to do gender firming health care. They talk about
Speaker 9: like an Obama mandate that forces health care plans to
Speaker 9: cover gender firming health care and making sure that physicians
Speaker 9: actually have to do it even if they personally don't
Speaker 9: want to be like, no, this is like your job,
Speaker 9: you have to provide health care. So they complain about
Speaker 9: all that kind of stuff, and then the last section
Speaker 9: of the pamphlet is on child development. Transmitter ideology is
Speaker 9: now promoted in schools for children are taught that gender
Speaker 9: is fluid, falls long a spectrum, and is detached from
Speaker 9: bodily sex. In addition, activists seek to punish anyone who
Speaker 9: expresses any reservations about radical treatment plans for gender dysphoric children.
Speaker 9: These plans can include socially transitioning children as young as four,
Speaker 9: administering puberty blocking drugs as young as nine, cross sex
Speaker 9: hormones is eng as fourteen, and surgery as young as eighteen.
Speaker 9: This ideology threatens parental rights. In Ohio, a Catholic family
Speaker 9: lost custody of their daughter when they oppose treatment of
Speaker 9: gender dysphoria with cross sex hormones. So, actually this is
Speaker 9: actually a pretty good breakdown of like how gender like
Speaker 9: affirming healthcare could work, because yeah, if a kid wants
Speaker 9: to like socially start transitioning very young and they want to, yes,
Speaker 9: that's great, there's no harm in that. If getting on
Speaker 9: puberty blockers at around nine, that makes sense, hormones as
Speaker 9: a teenager, yeah, and surgery maybe a little bit later. Yeah,
Speaker 9: that all seems quite quite reasonable. And in terms of
Speaker 9: this Catholic family, So a transfer of parents lost custody
Speaker 9: of their seventeen year old trans son in twenty eighteen
Speaker 9: after inducing suicidal ideation for refusing to let their child
Speaker 9: receive hormone therapy prescribed by a medical team who had
Speaker 9: been treating the child for two years. Custody was transferred
Speaker 9: to his grandparents. So this wasn't the state just like
Speaker 9: stealing this child away. It's like, no, you're like basically
Speaker 9: abusing this kid. So we're going to move custody over
Speaker 9: to the grandparents. Also, like you're opposing this for a
Speaker 9: seventeen year old, this is almost like a full legal adult.
Speaker 9: I'm going to quote from CNN here quote. The parents'
Speaker 9: attorney had argued that the child was no not even
Speaker 9: quote close to being able to make such a life
Speaker 9: altering decision at this time. Unquote, The county prosecuting attorney
Speaker 9: argued that the parents wanted to stop the treatment because
Speaker 9: it violated their religious beliefs unquote. So yeah, you're so
Speaker 9: scared that this seventeen year old is going to make
Speaker 9: a choice that you personally find a little bit icky,
Speaker 9: like cob on.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I'm pretty sure you can legally imantipate yourself at seventeen, right.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and usually you have like medical freedom, at least
Speaker 9: in Oregon, you have medical freedom at sixteen. I don't
Speaker 9: know what the case by case basis is in a
Speaker 9: lot of states. Yeah, but that's that's pretty fucked up.
Speaker 8: Now.
Speaker 9: There is nothing in the coverage about the family being Catholic.
Speaker 9: Heritage might be conflating this other story from Indiana where
Speaker 9: Catholic family lost custody of their trans kid in twenty
Speaker 9: twenty one for alleged child abuse, and then earlier this year,
Speaker 9: the Supreme Court declined to hear the parents' case.
Speaker 3: So, so there you go, big a health for them.
Speaker 9: They then talk about quote unquote research, what the research
Speaker 9: says about transition, The view that social medical transition is
Speaker 9: the appropriate treatment for people, including children who feel at
Speaker 9: odds with their biological sex is becoming more widely accepted. However,
Speaker 9: transitioning treatment, including puberty blocking hormones for children and sex
Speaker 9: change surgeries for teens and adults, come with serious consequences. Today,
Speaker 9: parents are told that puberty blockers and cross sex hormones
Speaker 9: may be the only way to prevent their child from
Speaker 9: committing suicide. However, according to the DSM five, as many
Speaker 9: as ninety eight percent of gender confused boys and eighty
Speaker 9: eight percent of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological
Speaker 9: sex after naturally passing through puberty. Okay, let's go over
Speaker 9: this because there's some weird phrasing here.
Speaker 3: Because no, that's not it.
Speaker 9: That's all with the DSM actually, says a writer named
Speaker 9: Micah b broke down this claim in a medium post
Speaker 9: from twenty eighteen. This exact sentence has been reused a
Speaker 9: lot of like writing publications over time. So accept their
Speaker 9: biological sex after naturally passing through puberty is a very
Speaker 9: loaded raise. Like a child who suffers from genitisphoria may
Speaker 9: receive treatment, whether that's through like like speech therapy, like
Speaker 9: talking about it with a therapist, or hormone blockers, and
Speaker 9: they may then choose to cease treatment and go through
Speaker 9: their natural puberty, right like that is, but yeah, that's
Speaker 9: not them like like one unquote like naturally passing through puberty.
Speaker 9: Like no, that that also involves a degree of treatment. Now,
Speaker 9: the reason why these numbers might be a little bit
Speaker 9: kind of odd, and also they're just false like the
Speaker 9: way that they're like being framed here, but in particular
Speaker 9: for kids, like the criteria for children having genitusphoria is
Speaker 9: different from the criteria for teens and adults, right, does
Speaker 9: mean different things. They also say as many as ninety
Speaker 9: eight percent. Many reason I say because the DSM five
Speaker 9: actually says that quote in natal males, persistence has ranged
Speaker 9: from two point two percent to thirty percent. In natal
Speaker 9: female else, persistance has ranged from twelve percent to fifty percent.
Speaker 9: So they took the lowest possible number and switched the
Speaker 9: stat around by saying that as many as ninety eight
Speaker 9: percent eventually accept their quote unquote biological sex. So that's
Speaker 9: that's a cute little little flip around. And then also,
Speaker 9: according to the DSM, a majority of boys sixty three
Speaker 9: to one hundred percent who quote unquote grow out of
Speaker 9: gender dysphoria just later turn out to be gay. Right,
Speaker 9: there is a difference between like gender dysphoria versus like
Speaker 9: gender deviance. That's why you, Yeah, you should like work
Speaker 9: with an actual medical team if you have like a
Speaker 9: kid who's like pre puberty, who has a degree of
Speaker 9: gender variance, because yeah, that could result in a whole
Speaker 9: bunch of a whole bunch of things, and the fact
Speaker 9: that some of them just grew up to be like
Speaker 9: gay kids is like the result of like successful medical treatment,
Speaker 9: and like it's like like a loving family. Like that
Speaker 9: is a good outcome. Similarly, the DSM says that thirty
Speaker 9: two to fifty percent of girls whose gender dysphoria does
Speaker 9: not persist later identify as gay.
Speaker 3: So there we go.
Speaker 9: That's pretty pretty pretty average stuff. They then go onto
Speaker 9: list all of the quote unquote side effects of gender
Speaker 9: affirming treatment, saying, quote meanwhile, radical gender affirming therapies post
Speaker 9: serious medical risks, including disfiguring acne, high blood pressure, weight gain,
Speaker 9: abnormal glucose tolerance, breast cancer, liver disease, thermioprosis, and cardiovascular disease.
Speaker 9: These are all the consequences of just puberty. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 9: depending on what puberty you go through. Yeah, it's gonna
Speaker 9: have different effects. That's just how puberty worries. Yeah, they
Speaker 9: also include uh and of course sterility, and this is
Speaker 9: still a hotly debated topic. There's some recent studies that
Speaker 9: show that there's actually a pretty good chance of people
Speaker 9: who go on estrogen being able to regain fertility after
Speaker 9: after like six months of ceasing treatment. It's not consistent, right,
Speaker 9: everyone who everyone who go on like HRT has an
Speaker 9: understanding that it can affect how they reproduce in the future.
Speaker 9: You're definitely encouraged to, like if you want to have
Speaker 9: kids or think you might want to have kids in
Speaker 9: the future, Like you can save your sperms, you can
Speaker 9: save your eggs, you can you can get that stuff
Speaker 9: ahead of time. Yeah, but this is also something that
Speaker 9: people are like working on of being able to like
Speaker 9: maintain the ability to have kids even like during or
Speaker 9: like after gender affirming health care treatment has like commenced,
Speaker 9: So that's cool. Finally, quote, puberty blocking therapies and cross
Speaker 9: sex hormones are non reversible, largely untested, and highly dangerous,
Speaker 9: especially for children. We've already we've already talked about how
Speaker 9: all of that is not true. We've already gone through
Speaker 9: all of that. Sex assignment surgeries have not been shown
Speaker 9: to reduce the extraordinarily high rate of suicide attempts among
Speaker 9: people who identify as transgender forty one percent compared to
Speaker 9: the general population's four point six percent. So this is
Speaker 9: also just like not true, Like everything, it's just not true. Also,
Speaker 9: there's no there's no citation here. A fear of you
Speaker 9: studying the Journal of Adlast and Health found that hormone
Speaker 9: therapy for trans youth reduced the rate of depression and
Speaker 9: suicide by forty percent. It also found that having like
Speaker 9: parental support during this process also heavily impacts the effectiveness
Speaker 9: of this treatment, specifically on depression and suicide. Like, if
Speaker 9: you're going through this treatment and your parents still hate you, yeah,
Speaker 9: that's going to actually, it's going to hurt the ability
Speaker 9: of this healthcare to actually be effective mentally. An investigation
Speaker 9: by doctors of the University of Washington found that trans
Speaker 9: youth who received gender affirming health care reduced their risk
Speaker 9: of suicide by seventy three percent compared to those who
Speaker 9: do not receive care, and a policy brief in the
Speaker 9: VA wrote quote, since nineteen seventy five, more than two
Speaker 9: thousand scientific studies have examined gender affirming care, supported by
Speaker 9: over thirty leading medical associations, including the World Health Organization
Speaker 9: and the American Medical Association, gender affirming care is deemed
Speaker 9: evidence based and effective at reducing suicide rates. This is
Speaker 9: all widely understood. This is such like an objectionable stance
Speaker 9: that even famous woke institution the VA, is like, yeah, no,
Speaker 9: it's actually really effective. Okay, And now actually, finally for
Speaker 9: this pamphletic quote, the most helpful therapies for children experiencing
Speaker 9: gender dysphoria do not try to remake the body to
Speaker 9: conform with thoughts and feelings, which is impossible, not impossible,
Speaker 9: but rather but rather to help people find healthy ways
Speaker 9: to manage their tension and move towards accepting the reality
Speaker 9: of their bodies. Unfortunately, fifteen states have passed laws of
Speaker 9: banning talk therapy for miners who struggle with gender dysphoria,
Speaker 9: and there's a bill in Congress which would do the same.
Speaker 9: There's no bill banning talk therapy. This is a conversion
Speaker 9: therapy ban. This isn't This isn't like actual talk therapy,
Speaker 9: which is a part of like actual healthcare treatment. This
Speaker 9: is against like conversion therapy. That is what they're actually
Speaker 9: talking about. So that is the bulk of the pan
Speaker 9: I also got given this other kind of I think
Speaker 9: it's called a fact sheet, which is ironic by the
Speaker 9: Heritage Action Group, which is the kind of lobbying activist
Speaker 9: arm branch of Heritage. It goes over a whole bunch
Speaker 9: of like the same stuff. They particularly don't like that
Speaker 9: the Department of Education released a report banning the use
Speaker 9: of offensive and inappropriate terms like mother and father in school.
Speaker 3: This isn't true.
Speaker 9: What they're talking about is that there's been a push
Speaker 9: to include just more gender neutral language, like instead of
Speaker 9: saying your mom and dad, just say parents. Like yeah,
Speaker 9: that makes sense. Yeah, that's that's specifically what they're complaining about.
Speaker 9: They complain about like books and schools. They call the
Speaker 9: Gender Queer Graphic Novel a book riddled with pornographic and
Speaker 9: pedophilic content.
Speaker 3: Not true. It's just simply isn't true.
Speaker 9: All these kind of old lies that we have talked
Speaker 9: about on the show like many times before. And then
Speaker 9: they also just rehash a whole bunch of of the
Speaker 9: claims from the other pamphlet They talk about the claim
Speaker 9: that in Virginia a girl was actually assaulted by a
Speaker 9: teen boy pretending to be a girl. And this is
Speaker 9: not an isolated incident. We've talked about that claim before.
Speaker 9: This was a fake story invented by the Daily Wire.
Speaker 9: This person was not trans. This was someone who was
Speaker 9: in a relationship with this girl who's actually assaulted her
Speaker 9: in a bathroom. Not a transperson, just a regular cysgender male.
Speaker 9: And then they talk about sports. They talk about how
Speaker 9: men have more upper body mass, and that puberty blockers
Speaker 9: do not change height, organ size, skeletal structure, muscle mass,
Speaker 9: or any of the biological characteristics that make men unequal
Speaker 9: opponents as hormones. Literally, they just list all the things
Speaker 9: that hormones actually change, like they actually famously do change
Speaker 9: all of those things. Height, skeletal structure, organ size, and
Speaker 9: muscle mass. Those are the main things.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 10: I mean, if that wasn't the case, you could just
Speaker 10: take testosterone and you it wouldn't affect you.
Speaker 9: Apparently, Yeah, famously, testosterone never changes your muscle mass.
Speaker 3: Yeah, just just and soundstronger man who never benefit.
Speaker 9: They also complain about how the Biden administration is wanted
Speaker 9: people to use preferred pronouns if you work in government,
Speaker 9: which is again is just trying to stop people from
Speaker 9: like harassing by using the wrong pronouns. It's it's all
Speaker 9: just ways to prevent harassment. And they complain about all
Speaker 9: that kind of stuff as well. So it's a lot
Speaker 9: of the same stuff from the pamphlets. A it's a
Speaker 9: pretty fun little fact sheet. Those are the two main
Speaker 9: pamphlets that were going around the RNC about gender ideology.
Speaker 9: That was kind of the most in depth it ever got.
Speaker 9: Most of the speeches did not even get into any specifics.
Speaker 9: They just like threw out keywords fractual like discussion, this is,
Speaker 9: this is this is the most in depth stuff they had.
Speaker 9: So this is largely like the bulk of like the
Speaker 9: average RNC attendees knowledge. This is actually probably more in
Speaker 9: depth than most average RNC attendees, at least in terms
Speaker 9: of what Heritage is putting out publicly, that is, their
Speaker 9: talking points, any any kind of closing thoughts here.
Speaker 3: Just dog shit. I didn't know what to say. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's really quite bad.
Speaker 9: It's not my favorite, but honestly, I think it's just
Speaker 9: so poorly written and I don't know how effective this
Speaker 9: is it could be a lot more transphobic. Oddly enough,
Speaker 9: they have a lot of like the same lies that
Speaker 9: the right has been like workshopping around certain claims around
Speaker 9: like trans healthcare and specifically how it relates to like kids.
Speaker 9: But I honestly don't see this as a very effective
Speaker 9: messaging for heritage.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it is that, like.
Speaker 10: It's that pathway to hate thing, you know that, like
Speaker 10: your grandchild has a nose pacing? How do you deal
Speaker 10: with this? Yes, that like it. It's it's not if
Speaker 10: you come at it too hard, people are going to
Speaker 10: be like what the fuck?
Speaker 3: But it gets people there.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 9: I also want to go over this because like we're
Speaker 9: gonna be entering the holiday season pretty soon, so whatever
Speaker 9: whatever Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners you're forced to attend. Yeah,
Speaker 9: you know, if if people start talking with that kind
Speaker 9: of stuff, it's probably gonna be claims that are similar
Speaker 9: to some of the stuff in here. And these things
Speaker 9: are like very easy to like research, especially all of
Speaker 9: the like puberty blocking stuff like that. There's the it's
Speaker 9: so easy to be like this just isn't true, And
Speaker 9: most of them just have no idea because if the
Speaker 9: information they're getting is in line with this kind of thing.
Speaker 9: It is just an alternate reality that that they are
Speaker 9: living in. Yeah, and some of them are fueled by
Speaker 9: like actual ideological hatred, and some of them are just
Speaker 9: actually legitimately just like misinformed.
Speaker 3: And that's something.
Speaker 9: I can't tell you how your family thinks, because I
Speaker 9: don't know your family, but it is it is a
Speaker 9: good thing to to like keep in mind that there
Speaker 9: is ways to talk about some of the sort of things.
Speaker 9: There's also if you just want to avoid it, avoid
Speaker 9: it all together and play Nintendo in the basement during
Speaker 9: Thanksgiving dinner with your cousins.
Speaker 3: That's also.
Speaker 9: Yeah, sometimes the move yeap support that. Well, this has
Speaker 9: been exciting. We will see you again probably tomorrow for
Speaker 9: more breaking news.
Speaker 3: And it is news that breaks you slowly of time.
Speaker 3: That is that is our demo, News that breaks you.
Speaker 10: Yeah, Hi everyone, and welcome to it could happen here.
Speaker 10: I'm James and today I am joined by Billy Ford
Speaker 10: from the United States Institute Piece.
Speaker 3: Third time podcast guest Billy, how many.
Speaker 7: Think it's my second?
Speaker 3: Thanks for second?
Speaker 10: Okay, Yeah, well I'll give you a bonus one. Yeah,
Speaker 10: and we're here to discuss the revolution in me Emma
Speaker 10: and bring you up to date on conflict stuff and
Speaker 10: natural disasters stuff and answer some questions people have asked
Speaker 10: me by emailing me. So, yeah, thanks for joining us, Biddy.
Speaker 10: We're at another crossroads in the conflicts we talked about
Speaker 10: before we started recording. Can you preaps explain to folks like,
Speaker 10: what has happened since ten twenty seven Part two?
Speaker 8: Sure?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, I think last time we talked, we
Speaker 5: were just kind of in the throes of the initial
Speaker 5: ten twenty seven phase. I mean, I think zooming out
Speaker 5: for a second, the you know, February twenty twenty one coup,
Speaker 5: September seventh, twenty twenty one, defensive wars announced and armed
Speaker 5: resistance really kicks off. And then twenty twenty three October
Speaker 5: things really escalate. After a few years of steady gains
Speaker 5: by the resistance, then there was a major level change
Speaker 5: and the trajectory of the war favoring the resistance forces.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I think, as you mentioned, there was a second phase
Speaker 5: of ten twenty seven in July in early August that.
Speaker 7: Took took things kind of to another level.
Speaker 5: Although it is kind of just a continuation of a
Speaker 5: sustained push by the resistance. I think some have perceived
Speaker 5: these moments of October twenty twenty three, inly August two
Speaker 5: point four adds real watershed moments. But I think we
Speaker 5: can see how these are illustrative or broader trends, trends
Speaker 5: in which the m R military is losing its capability
Speaker 5: to defend strategic positions, it's inability to counter attack on
Speaker 5: the resistance side, much greater coordination among resistance armed stakeholders,
Speaker 5: growing fighting capability, better weapons access, all these sorts of
Speaker 5: factors that have swung the balance of military power further
Speaker 5: in the favor of resistance forces. But essentially what happened
Speaker 5: in July and August was building off of the October advances,
Speaker 5: the resistance in northern Shan State, not far from the
Speaker 5: Chinese border, pushed further into central Miandmar in collaboration. This
Speaker 5: was essentially ethnic based armed organizations collaborating with Bamar People's
Speaker 5: Defense Forces under the command structure of the National Unity Government,
Speaker 5: and they have started making advances into sent to Burma.
Speaker 5: So whereas the initial phase of the war and the
Speaker 5: enug strategy was to focus on building relationships between the
Speaker 5: People's Defense forces under their command with ethnic based armed
Speaker 5: organizations and focusing strategically on the peripheries to build those relationships,
Speaker 5: to build ethnic buy into the broader revolution, to get
Speaker 5: access to weapons, and to make SEADI advances. Now we're
Speaker 5: at a phase where the resistance is pushing into central Meanmar.
Speaker 5: Now the focus is on the city of Mandalay and
Speaker 5: central Burma, which is the biggest commercial center of the country.
Speaker 5: So yeah, I mean this has sparked another phase of
Speaker 5: I think pressure and anxiety within Napida and the capital
Speaker 5: among the state Administrative council hunta leadership and more energy
Speaker 5: on the resistance side, And it's kind of it's it's
Speaker 5: occurred alongside advances on multiple other fronts. I mean in
Speaker 5: the very north of the country state, starting in March,
Speaker 5: the Kachin for has pushed the Memoral military out of it.
Speaker 5: It was two hundred posts within four months. Similarly in
Speaker 5: Rakhine State, which I think, well maybe we'll touch on more. Yeah,
Speaker 5: they are account army has made steady advances. So it's
Speaker 5: not just in these subregions. It's happening virtually all over
Speaker 5: the country at this point.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it does seem and like clearly the essays the
Speaker 10: Hunter is kind of on the back foot, like it
Speaker 10: started to forcibly conscript people, which in turn kind of
Speaker 10: get people a choice between the resistance or the military,
Speaker 10: and seems like more of them a choosing their resistance.
Speaker 10: Some of the conscriptions, you know, people can buy out
Speaker 10: of them, which obviously causes not great for the morale
Speaker 10: of the population. And that's combined with shortages and inflation.
Speaker 10: Pretty shit situation for folks living under Hunter.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, absolutely, I mean, I think the memor of military.
Speaker 5: I mean there's a big question here about like the
Speaker 5: resilience of this mea or military. I mean, frankly in
Speaker 5: militaries in other countries have collapsed in are much less pressure.
Speaker 5: So there's a question here about like what is holding
Speaker 5: this all together, particularly given that its primary resilience factors
Speaker 5: are heavily degraded. I mean things like it's ideological value.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's historically been about but we hold the
Speaker 5: country together, we manage the diversity of this complex country,
Speaker 5: we defend the Bamar and the Buddhist populations. These factors
Speaker 5: are no longer credible. I think it's more than one
Speaker 5: hundred thousand homes in central Burma have been burned to
Speaker 5: the grounds. Most of those are Bamar Buddhists, and you
Speaker 5: know someone in the Sanga have risen up. The Buddhist
Speaker 5: Songa have risen up in protests, including a recent killing
Speaker 5: of a senior monk. So I think that ideological foundation
Speaker 5: is totally degraded. The other factors, which are economic, the
Speaker 5: economic benefits of being in this institution are also withering,
Speaker 5: as like the entire economy is collapsing as your reference.
Speaker 5: And then the third component is like the social status
Speaker 5: that want to cheese through. Being a member of this
Speaker 5: institution used to be a place where you could get
Speaker 5: economic benefits and social benefits, and now it's really neither.
Speaker 5: I mean, you're reviled or a target for resistance assassination
Speaker 5: if you're affiliated with the institution. So I think the
Speaker 5: question remains as so like what are the key factors
Speaker 5: keeping it in place given all of these pressures that
Speaker 5: it's facing. And happy to go into that, but I
Speaker 5: think there it's an interesting case study in institutional resilience
Speaker 5: and the challenges faced by a resistance movement that has
Speaker 5: major resource constraints and you're fighting up against a military
Speaker 5: institution that has learned how to orchestrate and sustain authoritarian
Speaker 5: governance structures for decades.
Speaker 10: So yeah, yeah, yeah, I think we can maybe circle
Speaker 10: back to that. One thing I did want to talk
Speaker 10: about before we move on to talking about what's happening
Speaker 10: in recind State, is I wanted to talk about the
Speaker 10: recent flooding that people will have probably seen if they
Speaker 10: have these friends on social media or keep it keep
Speaker 10: an eye on publications in a region. Can you explain
Speaker 10: a little bit of about like the scale of the
Speaker 10: flooding and it absolutely bungled, if any response from NAPE
Speaker 10: door Sure.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think the latest figures that I've seen were
Speaker 5: one hundred and sixty thousand displaced, six hundred and thirty
Speaker 5: affected by the floods, two one hundred.
Speaker 7: And thirty dead, and seventy missing. I think that's what
Speaker 7: I saw this morning.
Speaker 5: But yeah, I mean I think that gives you a
Speaker 5: sense that this is another humanitarian catastrophe on top of
Speaker 5: a I think what is now rated the second most
Speaker 5: intent violent conflict in the world by Accolade.
Speaker 7: So this is just one crisis on top of another.
Speaker 5: And yeah, as you kind of alluded to, the Memora
Speaker 5: military is incapable and in unwilling to kind of address
Speaker 5: the needs here of the population.
Speaker 7: I mean, the one factor is that they.
Speaker 5: Don't have territorial control to move resources if they had
Speaker 5: the political will to provide assistance.
Speaker 7: But of course they're doing the exact opposite.
Speaker 5: In some of the most flood affected parts of the country,
Speaker 5: they are continuing to conduct.
Speaker 7: Air strikes on civilian populations.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean it's it's just kind of a level
Speaker 5: of brutality that's kind of hard to have them. But yeah,
Speaker 5: I mean there's all these other kind of ancillary effects
Speaker 5: of this. I think there's signs of a cholera outbreak
Speaker 5: and young gone. The economic conditions, as you mentioned a
Speaker 5: little bit earlier, are horrendous. I mean, like the economy
Speaker 5: is a lost thirty percent of its value, and it's
Speaker 5: not a rich country to begin with. Inflation is I
Speaker 5: think thirty two percent year on year, with the memoar
Speaker 5: Chat having lost two hundred percent of its value, I mean, yeah,
Speaker 5: it's two.
Speaker 7: Hundred percent less value than it was. Yeah, So this
Speaker 7: is like, you know, it's.
Speaker 5: Just one catastrophe on top of another, and it's really
Speaker 5: testing the memur public's capacity to kind of support one another,
Speaker 5: which is that's really been the incredible story here, and
Speaker 5: it's not the first time that the Memmour military, the
Speaker 5: governing stakeholder, has failed to meet the needs, and that
Speaker 5: moment of crisis. Of course, Psycho Nargis, one of the
Speaker 5: worst natural disasters in the region's history, was another instance
Speaker 5: in which the memor military refused international assistance and kind
Speaker 5: of instrumentalized humanitarian catastrophe for political aims.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and I think people it's worth reading up on
Speaker 10: that if you're interested in like the sort of longer
Speaker 10: term history of the conflict and of sort of the
Speaker 10: military and Memma. Maybe now it's a good time to
Speaker 10: take a break and we'll come back and discuss a
Speaker 10: little bit about Rakine State.
Speaker 3: And we're back, okay.
Speaker 10: So I think if people follow the conflict, they will
Speaker 10: have probably seen like a series of conflicting and confusing
Speaker 10: articles and messages about what's going on.
Speaker 3: In Rakind today.
Speaker 10: And some of that is because there's not a great
Speaker 10: deal of reporting in the English language, deal of sources
Speaker 10: in the English language, and even if there is, that
Speaker 10: none of us can really make it to Rakine State
Speaker 10: right now. Going through Bangladesh would be quite quite a
Speaker 10: challenging thing to do at this time, and so I
Speaker 10: guess we should start breaking down if people aren't aware
Speaker 10: the people who live and have lived for a long
Speaker 10: time in Racine State and the conflicts have fixed it
Speaker 10: between them and the Burmese state.
Speaker 7: Sure yeah, I.
Speaker 5: Mean ro Kinda State borders Bangladesh on the western side
Speaker 5: of your marts along coastal border as well, and the
Speaker 5: site of some of the largest extractive oil and gas projects,
Speaker 5: including the terminal for a major gas pipeline that feeds
Speaker 5: fourteen percent of u Non Province's GP, So it has
Speaker 5: huge strategic value.
Speaker 7: It's also China's aiming.
Speaker 5: To kind of access the Indian Ocean and circumvent the
Speaker 5: Strait of Malacca by going directly to this kind of
Speaker 5: regional the country, so it's highly strategically important. But it's
Speaker 5: also I think it's the second poorest state in the
Speaker 5: entire country and arguably the most conflict affected.
Speaker 7: At least since twenty twelve ish.
Speaker 5: So the population of rakind State is highly diverse, kind
Speaker 5: of the last year to have the broader countries demographics.
Speaker 5: It includes a Bamar population, which is the dominant ethnic
Speaker 5: group at the national level. The ethnic majority is kind
Speaker 5: there's I mean, historically a very large Muslim population of
Speaker 5: Rawhinjo Muslims primarily, but also other Muslim minority groups including
Speaker 5: Kaman Muslims, and then a number of other smaller ethnic
Speaker 5: minority groups Mramaji, Kami and others, as well as a
Speaker 5: small Hindu population. So you can kind of get the
Speaker 5: sense that this is a highly diverse space. I mean,
Speaker 5: many of the listeners will have heard twenty sixteen twenty seventeen,
Speaker 5: Go was the site of a massive clearance operation and
Speaker 5: the genocide of Rhinja Muslims, about seven hundred and fifty
Speaker 5: thousand of whom were pushed into Bangladesh, and all of
Speaker 5: them are still there.
Speaker 7: Inhabiting the largest refugee camp in the world.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean overall conditions for the Hinja, It's hard
Speaker 5: to imagine a more difficult set of conditions. The Bangladesh
Speaker 5: government is quite impatient, having hosted many hundreds of thousands
Speaker 5: of Arhinja, some for seven years but others for actually
Speaker 5: for much longer than that. As twenty sixteen twenty seventeen
Speaker 5: was a moment in a genocide, but there have been
Speaker 5: instances of memoir military atrocities against the Hindu population dating
Speaker 5: back to the nineteen seventies as well. So this is
Speaker 5: a long term kind of situation in which the Bangladesh
Speaker 5: have been hosting Rehinja And yeah, I mean I think
Speaker 5: conditions in those camps are really really challenging. The major
Speaker 5: issue now is the arising and security in the camps,
Speaker 5: as some Rhinja militia groups have gained ascendency in the camps,
Speaker 5: most of which have very little public support.
Speaker 7: Population should be noted.
Speaker 5: The major dynamic that that's happened recently, I mean the
Speaker 5: Arakan Army, which is almost entirely of Kine ethnic groups
Speaker 5: and has broad public support among the Rakaine population of
Speaker 5: Rikine State, has made massive advances across Rakine State and
Speaker 5: now controls virtually all of northern Rakine State and is
Speaker 5: pushing south. It took the city of Tondue and the airport,
Speaker 5: which is the first time a resistance group had taken
Speaker 5: an airport. It recently took a naval base, the first
Speaker 5: time that has ever happened in the history of the
Speaker 5: Memory military. And now it's pushing as far south as Guas,
Speaker 5: potentially threatening to control the entire state.
Speaker 7: So as this has.
Speaker 5: Occurred, the MIMR military is in a state of complete panic,
Speaker 5: and as it is losing forces on this front but
Speaker 5: also on numerous other fronts, it has attempted to kind
Speaker 5: of buttress its forces through force conscription and in the
Speaker 5: most potentially the most horrifying move, it is forcibly conscripted
Speaker 5: the Rowhinja into the MR military. They conducted genocide against
Speaker 5: the Rhinda population and now they are forcing them to
Speaker 5: wear the uniform of their genocider. It's kind of a
Speaker 5: level of horror that's hard to understand. And one way
Speaker 5: in which they've undertaken this effort is by collaborating with
Speaker 5: Rehindra militia forces including ARSA, the Salvation Army and the
Speaker 5: Rhindra Saldarity Organization ARSO, which have presence in the camps
Speaker 5: and have been facilitating recruitment from the camps. So the
Speaker 5: primary aim here as a military one, but a secondary aim,
Speaker 5: which is really critical it is undermining inter cohesion in
Speaker 5: kind state because ultimately, like the MR military operates through coercion,
Speaker 5: force and violence, but also through fragmentation so that it
Speaker 5: doesn't face a unified resistance, and in this case they
Speaker 5: want to incite instability by creating hatred between the Rhindra
Speaker 5: and in population and building off of the vitriol that
Speaker 5: had built over decades. So this is kind of a
Speaker 5: new paradigm that everyone is trying to better understand.
Speaker 7: But yeah, it's it's kind of a new level of horror.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and it's particularly horrific. As you say, I think
Speaker 10: sometimes there's a tendency, especially with people who perhaps are
Speaker 10: not as familiar with the situation and history there, to
Speaker 10: lump ethnic groups in as sort of monolithic actors, right
Speaker 10: or homogeneous to be like, Okay, so they're a hinja
Speaker 10: as represented by Arsa and the rso have joined the Hunter,
Speaker 10: which is not the case. Like every Rhina person I
Speaker 10: speak to, everyone I speak to in Cox's Bizarre shares
Speaker 10: a loathing for those organizations. They're forced conscription of young people,
Speaker 10: and yeah, their solidarity with the Hunter that committed the
Speaker 10: genocide against and it continues to commit a genocide against
Speaker 10: these people. And I think the first thing we need
Speaker 10: to do is move away from that kind of homogeneous perspective.
Speaker 10: But maybe we could explain there have been a few
Speaker 10: accusations of the arkon Omy making attacks against a range
Speaker 10: of people, right range of specifically Raine of people who
Speaker 10: are not armed, who are not part of ours are. Yeah,
Speaker 10: can you explain what we know and what we don't
Speaker 10: know there?
Speaker 8: Sure?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think there's just to start.
Speaker 5: There is a massive fog of war in Rekind state,
Speaker 5: may be worse than any other part of the country,
Speaker 5: so it is really difficult to disentangle fact from fiction here.
Speaker 5: But I think there's pretty credible evidence that the army
Speaker 5: have committed atrosities against Rahinda civilian populations. In early August,
Speaker 5: there was a specific incident in which hundreds of Rahina
Speaker 5: were killed in a drone strike, and Fortified Rights, which
Speaker 5: is a human rights organization, conducted investigation to the incident
Speaker 5: and asserts that the Arkon Army was responsible for that.
Speaker 5: Of course, the AA disputes these claims. And I think
Speaker 5: there's a few recent interviews with the commander in chief
Speaker 5: of the army to nine where you know, he articulates
Speaker 5: the side of the story, which you can find on
Speaker 5: Irwadi dot com and I think in a few other
Speaker 5: news outlets.
Speaker 10: Yeah, the diplomat did one as well. He's been on
Speaker 10: a publicity tour, I guess recently.
Speaker 7: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 10: I don't know if you've seen this, but like his
Speaker 10: his tendency to cool hinder people bangladeshis it is unfortunate
Speaker 10: given that that's a language that was used to justify
Speaker 10: the genocide.
Speaker 5: Right, absolutely, Yeah, it reflects kind of the language that
Speaker 5: the Memora military used.
Speaker 3: Well, Bengali's he'll call them exactly. Yeah, it's very reflective
Speaker 3: of that.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So this is really challenging, and part because I think
Speaker 5: that there is kind of an important distinction between the
Speaker 5: Metamora military and the ark Army in this case, in
Speaker 5: part because the ar Army has like raw public support
Speaker 5: among the kind public, and so it has a more
Speaker 5: of a legitimate stake to governance than the Memora military,
Speaker 5: which has none. And so this is it's kind of
Speaker 5: an issue that requires a tension and an honest accounting
Speaker 5: of the facts and a long process of reconciliation or
Speaker 5: because of the ark On Army is likely there to
Speaker 5: stay as a governing stakeholder. So that is a really
Speaker 5: tricky kind of set of conditions.
Speaker 7: And the other side of this is that the rekined public.
Speaker 5: I think there is a deep sense of a grievance
Speaker 5: among the rekind public, and this is a population that
Speaker 5: has also faced years of intense political alienation and persecution.
Speaker 7: Not to mention war and violence.
Speaker 5: You know, last year when Cyclo and Moca hit the
Speaker 5: Kind State, the Memora military did virtually nothing to help them.
Speaker 5: So it's a population with legitimate agrievances and they and
Speaker 5: their perception is that the international community only focuses on
Speaker 5: the revent of public's well being.
Speaker 7: And I think the international community can.
Speaker 5: Do a better job of showing sympathy for the rekined
Speaker 5: public's interests. I think sympathy is not like zero sum
Speaker 5: in that sense, and that needs to be done better.
Speaker 5: But honestly, like the equating a grievances is also really
Speaker 5: kind of unfair and dishonest. And you know, this Hindu
Speaker 5: population is marginalized to just such an extreme degree.
Speaker 7: And so those are a really interesting report by Doctors
Speaker 7: Without Borders not.
Speaker 5: Too long ago it that showed that only like six
Speaker 5: hundred thousand of the two point eight million Rahinja in
Speaker 5: the world within MR, fifty seven percent are living in
Speaker 5: camps and Bangladesh or in IDP camps in Memr. So
Speaker 5: it's like there's just like a highly vulnerable population that
Speaker 5: has experienced genocide.
Speaker 7: You know, it's like there are there's a power imbalance, you.
Speaker 3: Know, So it's like, I think it's not the same.
Speaker 7: I don't know.
Speaker 5: The whole process of kind Rhinda reconciliation is one that
Speaker 5: deserves immediate and urgent attention, but there's also a long
Speaker 5: term process of constructing, you know, a governance structure that
Speaker 5: is acceptable and that's not a highly exclusionary of Rhinda
Speaker 5: and these sorts of things. So it's a it's a
Speaker 5: highly and beyond the fact that like we need more
Speaker 5: a deliberate investigation these incidents, I think a broader conversational
Speaker 5: reconciliation and justice needs to needs to take place.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and it's definitely one at least, you know, I
Speaker 10: speak to people who are probably on the more progressive
Speaker 10: side of the resistance, and it's one that they've acknowledged,
Speaker 10: like it's something that they need to address and kind
Speaker 10: of the litmus test for like a post hunter me
Speaker 10: and Mars, like are there places for these people who
Speaker 10: they weren't places for in this state before? But yeah,
Speaker 10: how we get there is it's difficult, and I don't
Speaker 10: think that's not that's not a clear pathway that anyone's
Speaker 10: kind of pointed to this yet Yeah.
Speaker 5: The one thing I would add is like this is
Speaker 5: sort of emblematic of broader perceptions of MEMR and approaches
Speaker 5: to peace building a MEMR is that there's there's often
Speaker 5: a horizontal approach that like we need to work on
Speaker 5: the intercommunal level, individual level trust building that sort of thing,
Speaker 5: And I think there is a place for that for sure.
Speaker 5: But we've done a couple of pieces of research with
Speaker 5: an academic at ug Austin who has found some really
Speaker 5: interesting stuff about like the nature of conflict in the
Speaker 5: country and nature of cohesion in the country. And she's
Speaker 5: found including through some experimental research studies and designs which
Speaker 5: are quite revealing. I think that national identity is often
Speaker 5: more important to respondence in her surveys than ethnic identity,
Speaker 5: which is which kind of cuts against like the traditional
Speaker 5: perceptions of how MEMRA is, like, oh, it's this irreconcilable,
Speaker 5: fractious place and it's so hard to build trust between communities.
Speaker 7: And that sort of thing.
Speaker 5: But her research kind of points to the vertical dimension
Speaker 5: where it's the nature of memorpolitics and the nature of
Speaker 5: governance structures that highly exclusionary, discriminatory governance structures have sustained
Speaker 5: conflict for so long in the country, and this is
Speaker 5: kind of like the main argument for the resistance. You know,
Speaker 5: it's like a lot of the safeholders, at least a
Speaker 5: critical mass within this resistance movement, they're trying to assert
Speaker 5: a new political paradigm in the country, you know, a
Speaker 5: more state about political paradigm in which the mem R
Speaker 5: military is not a dominant stakeholder, in which violence is
Speaker 5: not your source of power, yeah, and which that's not
Speaker 5: built on exclusionary norms of belonging.
Speaker 7: So it's like it is generally a revolution.
Speaker 5: In this sense, and that is why they're they're kind
Speaker 5: of pushing against the international pressures to enter into a
Speaker 5: power sharing your dream with the MR military, because there's
Speaker 5: a perception that if the MEMR military remains in a
Speaker 5: position of political power, they will interrupt this reform process
Speaker 5: and then violence will persist.
Speaker 7: In the country.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Yeah, And I think that's probably a reasonable assumption to make. Like, again,
Speaker 10: this is like one of those things that I see
Speaker 10: a lot in different places in the world where I go, right,
Speaker 10: that's this tendency to see things, I think from sort
Speaker 10: of colonial perspective and just be like, oh, these ethnicities
Speaker 10: will squabble and fight, and like that's not necessarily the
Speaker 10: case at all, and like if you look even to
Speaker 10: the PDFs, like I was speaking to someone the other
Speaker 10: day who was saying, like, there're a job Mostlim women
Speaker 10: fighting with the Koren right now, which is something that
Speaker 10: doesn't align up with this idea of like ethnicities which
Speaker 10: are clashing and can't combine.
Speaker 3: And we saw like.
Speaker 10: A statement of solidarity from the Kareni to the Kurdish people,
Speaker 10: which doesn't line up with this idea of an inherently
Speaker 10: Islamophobic like it you know, sort of massive of Buddhist
Speaker 10: people in the Amma, which I think, yeah, it's a
Speaker 10: little oversimplified to say that stuff, and I think sometimes reductive,
Speaker 10: And it's the analysis of mean Mar like as a
Speaker 10: place where colonialism is still occurring, and the methods of colonialism,
Speaker 10: like lots of the things you describe right, like promoting fractures,
Speaker 10: promoting these different ethnic identities which are seen as kind
Speaker 10: of zero sum and mutually exclusive. These are things that
Speaker 10: the United Kingdom did or Britain did all around the
Speaker 10: world for centuries. And it's not rocket science to see
Speaker 10: how that jumps to another group which especially in some
Speaker 10: it is was trained by the British or had relations
Speaker 10: with the British, and you know, to see how we
Speaker 10: got there.
Speaker 3: But I think we'll take a little break here.
Speaker 10: We'll come back and I want to discuss the resilience
Speaker 10: of the Hunter and how it's hanging on.
Speaker 3: All right, we're back.
Speaker 10: So for the last little segment of this podcast, I
Speaker 10: would like to discuss how the Burmese military is holding
Speaker 10: onto power. When I speak to soldiers who have defected,
Speaker 10: I speak, I've spoken to about half a dozen I
Speaker 10: guess soldiers who have defected over time. It's almost comic
Speaker 10: how disorganized and chaotic things are, and at the same
Speaker 10: time it's terrible the way, like every single one of
Speaker 10: them has described to me that their families are essentially
Speaker 10: held as collateral to stop them deserting, right, and so
Speaker 10: they had to work with the civil disobedience movement to
Speaker 10: first extract their families before they themselves took their weapons
Speaker 10: in most cases because they get a bounty for their
Speaker 10: weapons and went to join their resistance or in some
Speaker 10: cases went into exile. So like, maybe that gives us
Speaker 10: a good view on how the Hunter is. It's continuing
Speaker 10: to force people to fight in this war that it's losing.
Speaker 10: Can you explain a little bit of how they've held
Speaker 10: onto power?
Speaker 5: Sure, yeah, I guess the first thing to note is
Speaker 5: that rates of defection are totally historic.
Speaker 7: I mean, yeah, there's by.
Speaker 5: Our account, about fifteen thousand deserters, which is actually not radically.
Speaker 7: Different than historical norms.
Speaker 5: The mem or military has comparatively high rates of desertion
Speaker 5: even before the coup, so that's not far outside of
Speaker 5: the norm. But the defection, I think there's about fifty
Speaker 5: eight hundred defectors by our account since the coup, which
Speaker 5: is unprecedented. There's never never really been defection to resistance
Speaker 5: in memr's history. The other factor is the number of
Speaker 5: individuals who are surrendering without a fight with you know,
Speaker 5: with with putting up little resistance. That number is hard
Speaker 5: to count, but it's by our by our raid, it
Speaker 5: seems to be quite high. There's forms of acts of
Speaker 5: disloyalty occurring that are not you know, spurring institutional collapse,
Speaker 5: but are that are degrading the memoir of military's fighting capabilities,
Speaker 5: which is.
Speaker 7: A really important dynamic. So say that at the outset outset.
Speaker 5: The other thing i'd say is that, like I think
Speaker 5: we need to sort of think about this at three levels. So,
Speaker 5: like the rank and file soldiers, they are significantly demoralized.
Speaker 5: Most did not join the military to fight. They joined
Speaker 5: the military for economic stability and for social status, and
Speaker 5: neither of those are available to them under this military's leadership.
Speaker 5: They certainly did not join to commit atrocities against the
Speaker 5: Bamar Buddhist population, which is now what they're enforced to.
Speaker 5: So I think that population, the large number of rank
Speaker 5: and file soldiers, is highly demoralized, and that's where you
Speaker 5: have seen lots of desertion defection, often from the front lines.
Speaker 5: Though that population's defection desertion is not going to trigger
Speaker 5: institutional collapse.
Speaker 7: At the second level, you have like a commander, Core, Major,
Speaker 7: Major and above.
Speaker 5: And these I think since Operation ten twenty seven you've
Speaker 5: seen their morale to drop. And I mean there's been
Speaker 5: the fall of Last Show and the loss of the
Speaker 5: Northeast Regional Command, the first time in the Manor's history
Speaker 5: that a regional command's been taken. That has sent shockways
Speaker 5: through the commander level. The other thing is that min Onlign,
Speaker 5: the Commander in chief in his attempt to consolidate power
Speaker 5: and protect himself from from internal fragmentation.
Speaker 7: He's rotating commanders.
Speaker 5: Based on loyalty, not based on effectiveness, which is also
Speaker 5: degrading the Memora military's fighting capability. But it's also that's
Speaker 5: maybe one reason why you have seen less acts of
Speaker 5: disloyalty within that layer at the senior level. I mean
Speaker 5: most most of those senior Memorr military officials who are
Speaker 5: based in Apida, I think they until the fall of
Speaker 5: Latio and the resistance moving into Mandalay, there was relatively
Speaker 5: high levels of sense of security and morale was okay,
Speaker 5: I suppose, But the fall of Las SiO and the
Speaker 5: ensuing events has really inflamed internal frustration from what we understand.
Speaker 5: So this has also triggered some shifts in the way
Speaker 5: in which the MEMR military operates its patronage structures. So
Speaker 5: traditionally the patriot in structure is essentially like a feudal state.
Speaker 5: I mean, you have like a commander in chief that
Speaker 5: is extremely powerful, has authority to rotate or fire or
Speaker 5: arrest virtually anyone.
Speaker 7: I mean, just huge amounts of powers centralized there.
Speaker 5: The deputy commander in chief has little capability to challenge
Speaker 5: the commander in chief's authority. But then you have these
Speaker 5: regional commanders that operate as feudal lords.
Speaker 7: At the regional level.
Speaker 5: They're able to extract huge amount ounts of value or
Speaker 5: wealth through attractive industries, illegal industries.
Speaker 7: All with total impunity.
Speaker 5: But often you know, with the approval of nepidal, and
Speaker 5: that approval was often just given. Now it's less it's
Speaker 5: less easily given. I mean, you've seen ninety senior officers
Speaker 5: shuffled changed positions since the coup, and fifty have been
Speaker 5: removed or arrested by our tracking, and you've also seen
Speaker 5: individuals detained and arrested because I think there's fifteen kernels
Speaker 5: or above, mostly brigadier generals and major generals who have
Speaker 5: been arrested for business related activities.
Speaker 7: Which I think is emblematic of like the.
Speaker 5: Restructuring of the patrinage network and centralizing the patronage network
Speaker 5: with men online himself. If you do not have his
Speaker 5: personal approval, you cannot conduct business activities, including these highly
Speaker 5: lucrative scam operations that are generating billions in value, but
Speaker 5: also really frustrating that I need. So this whole patient
Speaker 5: is structure which is critical to sustaining the Memora military
Speaker 5: is being reoriented, and we'll see whether or not that
Speaker 5: helps sustain the institution or introduces more instability.
Speaker 7: But ultimately, the forms.
Speaker 5: Of resilience I guess you would call it are the
Speaker 5: ones maybe you pointed to.
Speaker 7: I mean they're structure. I mean it's like rotating officer.
Speaker 5: Commanders and senior officers regularly holding families hostage. Essentially, you know,
Speaker 5: a soldier sent to the front lines, its family remains
Speaker 5: in the barracks. Payment is often made to the families,
Speaker 5: not to the front line's soldier, and there's retribution if
Speaker 5: the frontline soldier defects or deserts.
Speaker 7: This is also where the fifty eight.
Speaker 5: Hundred number I mentioned earlier is likely I radical undercounting
Speaker 5: because and also the fifteen thousand desertions because a lot
Speaker 5: of people are recorded as KIA when they're.
Speaker 7: Actually they've deserted or defected.
Speaker 5: So anyways, I'm not sure if that answers your question,
Speaker 5: which some thoughts relatively usually Yeah.
Speaker 3: No, I think it does. Yeah.
Speaker 10: One of the guys I met with described basically his
Speaker 10: entire I guess squad went out on a patrol and defected.
Speaker 10: I guess the PDF have been I had to describe
Speaker 10: it really, but it's basically shit talking them in their
Speaker 10: barracks or like in their position for months. Right, They're like,
Speaker 10: you see this a lot. It's a kind of unique
Speaker 10: feature of the of the conflict in the MMR, like
Speaker 10: guys with megaphones just being like, you can surrender if
Speaker 10: you want. You know, your life is miserable. And I
Speaker 10: guess in this case it worked. And yeah, they they
Speaker 10: will be read to as kia they went out in
Speaker 10: a patrol and never came back.
Speaker 5: But yeah, I guess the other dynamic is that, like
Speaker 5: you need to align motivation and opportunity for defection desertion,
Speaker 5: and the motivation is there in a lot of cases,
Speaker 5: but opportunity is not. You know. The resistance is committing
Speaker 5: some resources to this these efforts, but it's really limited
Speaker 5: given the scale of the challenge. Yeah, there's a lot
Speaker 5: of factors that need to kind of come together, like
Speaker 5: the ability to see communicate with resistance, the ability to
Speaker 5: move into resistance, all the areas of the perception that
Speaker 5: we were accepted and not phase retribution, the perception that
Speaker 5: living conditions are acceptable to them. You know, So there's
Speaker 5: all these conditions and given the costs of defection desertion
Speaker 5: which could be like major attribution against your family, and
Speaker 5: deep uncertainty about leaving this institution that is kind of
Speaker 5: a state within a state. That's why we're not seeing
Speaker 5: the kind of large scale, commander level defection desertion I think.
Speaker 11: Right.
Speaker 10: So, one last thing I wanted to talk about before
Speaker 10: we finish up. If people, I guess keep tabs on
Speaker 10: the conflict, they would have seen recently a video. I'm
Speaker 10: sure you've seen the Kachin Independence Army shooting down in
Speaker 10: aircraft with an FN six Chinese man portaal air defense system.
Speaker 10: It's what they sort of called manpads. I'm sure women
Speaker 10: can carry them to just fine or anyone else for
Speaker 10: that matter. But I think it happened in January and
Speaker 10: the video has just come out. Can you explain this
Speaker 10: to nificance of that within the conflict landscape? And we
Speaker 10: am A yeah.
Speaker 7: I guess there's a couple of points.
Speaker 5: One is about China's posture and the other is about
Speaker 5: the military balance. I think the Minomour military's air power
Speaker 5: is its primary comparative advantage. I think at this point
Speaker 5: it has fewer blight infagery forces than the resistance, but
Speaker 5: that it's.
Speaker 7: Heavy artillery and especially it's air power. You know, that's
Speaker 7: how it terrorizes the population.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but it's also been a source of it's been
Speaker 5: a very powerful mobilizing force. I mean, I think after
Speaker 5: Phase one of ten twenty seven, the MMDAA Ko Kong
Speaker 5: armed group essentially it took back territory that it proceeds
Speaker 5: to be their own and took the town of lau Kai,
Speaker 5: which was really surprising.
Speaker 7: But a major advance.
Speaker 5: And then everyone kind of perceived, Okay, they'll just stay
Speaker 5: in the quote Unquoteqo Kong areas, They'll stay where they are.
Speaker 7: But I think there's a deep perception.
Speaker 5: Among the MDAA but also broader ethnic minority groups that
Speaker 5: as long as the mr military is in power and
Speaker 5: has air capability, it will terrorize the public.
Speaker 7: Even if it cannot reach or.
Speaker 5: Ever take back Laukai, it will vomit. And that's exactly
Speaker 5: what we saw after ten twenty seven. You saw air
Speaker 5: strikes and Laukai, you saw air strikes and lights of the.
Speaker 7: Headquarters of the Kachin Independence Army.
Speaker 5: You see air strikes in parts of her kind state
Speaker 5: that the mem R military has no chance of recapturing.
Speaker 7: You know, it's a terrorizing the public thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a punitive thing.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's punitive thing. So and it also is powerfully motivating.
Speaker 5: It's like, Okay, now you see the MNDA pushing all
Speaker 5: the way to Lascio, and a lot of people didn't
Speaker 5: think they would do that. But it's like, if you
Speaker 5: have a perception that this MR Military can hurt me
Speaker 5: from a distance, they may need to eliminate them altogether
Speaker 5: in order to achieve the level of stability and safety
Speaker 5: that they pursue. So like it's the double edged sword
Speaker 5: in that regard. But going back to your question, I
Speaker 5: mean think like if the resistance is capable of constraining
Speaker 5: the MR military's air capable, it radically changes the balance
Speaker 5: of power. I mean, I think there are some elements
Speaker 5: of this that are been a primary focus of some
Speaker 5: of the international human rights community, for example, constraining access
Speaker 5: to jet fuel and these sorts of things, trying to
Speaker 5: push for an arms embargo, none of which I've succeeded,
Speaker 5: but there's been kind of progress on the margins. Although
Speaker 5: I think we just saw Russia delivered jet fuel and
Speaker 5: the maritime routes in southern Mars.
Speaker 10: So yeah, in exchange for the artillery shows that the
Speaker 10: Mamma has sent to Russia.
Speaker 5: Right, Oh, okay, realize, Okay, yeah, So I mean they're continued,
Speaker 5: they're able to sustain that, and you know, and the
Speaker 5: Chinese has sold i think six aircrafts last year, so
Speaker 5: they still have this fighting capability, and they're still able
Speaker 5: to extract foreign exchange essentially by stealing from exporters. But
Speaker 5: that's a whole different conversation. But anyway, like I think, yeah,
Speaker 5: this is a key dynamic if they're able to affect
Speaker 5: their their air power. The other thing is that like
Speaker 5: China is attempted to play both sides. I mean historically
Speaker 5: that's sort of their approach. I mean, they have deep
Speaker 5: connections with armed organizations along its border, maybe closer even
Speaker 5: than that with the Memware military, but they also provide
Speaker 5: political legitimacy and material assistance to the Menware military. They
Speaker 5: just actually signed an MU on law enforcement and security
Speaker 5: or some sort with the military. That's a deep and
Speaker 5: abiding relationship, in part because the Chinese don't see an alternative.
Speaker 7: I mean, I don't think they have much trust for
Speaker 7: dan U G or.
Speaker 5: Other resistance groups, and despite the fact that they don't,
Speaker 5: they also don't really trust the memorare military or perceive
Speaker 5: them to be competent. They see them kind of as
Speaker 5: their only potential partner in IPIDOT. But it's kind of
Speaker 5: a question as to whether this strategy is still working
Speaker 5: for them. I think we've seen lots of acts of
Speaker 5: defiance from both sides, the mean or military and resistance
Speaker 5: groups visa be China.
Speaker 7: I mean, they are military.
Speaker 5: They've been pressuring them to hold elections for since the coup,
Speaker 5: essentially yea, and they're really no closer yeah to that happening.
Speaker 5: I mean, I think they dissolve the NLD, something the
Speaker 5: Chinese said not to do. And more recently, they've designated
Speaker 5: a number of resistance groups as terrorist organizations, which essentially
Speaker 5: obviates political negotiations, which I think would certainly frustrate the Chinese,
Speaker 5: given that they hope to achieve stability through political ingratiations
Speaker 5: between a subset of resistance groups and then aneral military.
Speaker 5: So there are these kind of acts of defiance also
Speaker 5: on the resistance side. I mean, the Chinese are pushing
Speaker 5: for ceasefires, and yet the resistance continues to push into
Speaker 5: the country, and they're sort of a perception that like,
Speaker 5: as the resistance groups aligned with China quote.
Speaker 7: Unquote aligned with China, maybe they aren't.
Speaker 5: A gain ascendency on the battlefield in particular, then China's
Speaker 5: influenced gains.
Speaker 7: But I'm not sure whether that's the case.
Speaker 5: It might actually be in verse, like, as these groups
Speaker 5: push to Memmre and have more charge oryal control, maybe
Speaker 5: they have more options and they're less dependent on the Chinese.
Speaker 5: So that relationship in the north along the Chinese border
Speaker 5: is also very much in flux.
Speaker 7: I don't think it's clear exactly how that will play out.
Speaker 10: Yeah, no, it's not, And I think that's sort of
Speaker 10: a big question that's overhanging. Obviously, you have actives that
Speaker 10: are more close your line with China, like the United
Speaker 10: worst Date Army, who have sort of largely remained aloof
Speaker 10: from the conflict or a loof maybe it's her own word,
Speaker 10: but are not like directly committing most of their forces
Speaker 10: to the Conflict's pretty a better way of saying it, right.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 5: And now that there's a ton of pressure on them
Speaker 5: to stop selling arms to other groups, so we'll see
Speaker 5: whether that happens.
Speaker 10: Yeah, which is probably where the Kaschin Independence Army was
Speaker 10: able to get the surface where missiles from, which brings
Speaker 10: us back to that. Yeah, it's it's never not complicated,
Speaker 10: but it's always very sad that, like the folks quit
Speaker 10: in the middle of this are suffering horrendously and sometimes
Speaker 10: suffering kind of out of sight and out of mind
Speaker 10: for so many people. As you know, a news cycle
Speaker 10: continues to kind of either trivialize or completely ignore what's
Speaker 10: happening in Memma, which is pretty sad. People often ask me,
Speaker 10: like where they can find reliable news sources and where
Speaker 10: they can send their money if they want to help
Speaker 10: people in Mema. Do you have any good suggestions for that?
Speaker 8: Sure?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean I think for news, I guess for
Speaker 5: like day to day news like Fronter Memr is a
Speaker 5: fantastic source, as is meanmore Now and the Airwadi. These
Speaker 5: are they have English language content that would be really
Speaker 5: interesting and accessible. My organization US Institute Piece. You can
Speaker 5: check out our website. We publish a lot of analytical
Speaker 5: work on there related to the conflict. You're welcome to
Speaker 5: check there. I think there's a really good another podcast,
Speaker 5: it's really good Insight MEMR that is worth checking out.
Speaker 5: Started as like a Buddhism oriented podcast talking about in Pasana.
Speaker 5: Now its branched into a much broader range of issues.
Speaker 7: Some of the best stuff I've.
Speaker 5: Heard and actually affiliated with inside mem R is an
Speaker 5: organization called Better Burma that provides entering assistance.
Speaker 7: And one you could contribute to.
Speaker 5: There's an organization called Skills for Humanity that provides a
Speaker 5: lot of humanitarian assistance on the ground.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you mentioned.
Speaker 5: Liberate the MMR before we started recording. That can also
Speaker 5: be a good support.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I think Skills to Humanity also accept maybe they
Speaker 10: accept direct I was speaking to them about like medical
Speaker 10: equipment that they needed. Yeah, they they accept direct donations
Speaker 10: or not. But people who want to volunteer medically let's
Speaker 10: want to look out for Yeah, that was fantastic.
Speaker 3: Billy.
Speaker 10: Is there any way anythink else you'd like to plug?
Speaker 10: Like why people can follow you or us i P online.
Speaker 5: Us i P dot org. Most of my writing is
Speaker 5: on there. I'm on Twitter, Twitter at b I L
Speaker 5: L E E, the number four, the letter D. But yeah,
Speaker 5: I mean I checked those sources I mentioned. It's there's
Speaker 5: not more kind of content in the mainstream media, but
Speaker 5: there's there's a lot of really incredible reporting coming from
Speaker 5: the ground, from people taking incredible risks to share information.
Speaker 5: So encourage you to support some of those local outlets.
Speaker 10: Yeah, definitely, including financially if you can. It's like doing
Speaker 10: the work that really needs to be done. Thank you
Speaker 10: so much for your time than we appreciate you being
Speaker 10: a host.
Speaker 2: Jeez, welcome to It could happen here a podcast that
Speaker 2: is reported. But I'm very tired. But you know who's
Speaker 2: not tired? Garrison Davis, our host for today.
Speaker 9: No, I'm probably more tired than you.
Speaker 3: I was up to I don't know about that.
Speaker 9: No, I was up till nine am. Eest writing desks.
Speaker 2: Oh geez. Yeah, I went to bed by like five
Speaker 2: or six.
Speaker 3: I except for three hours. I'm going right back to
Speaker 3: bed after this.
Speaker 9: Excellent as is the grind, you know, riseing grind, that's
Speaker 9: my motto.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm going to do the same things. All right, Well, Garrison,
Speaker 2: what are we What are we talking about today? What's
Speaker 2: our episode about? What's this sewed on?
Speaker 9: So it's it's been a while since we've done like
Speaker 9: an update on what meme politics are up to. I
Speaker 9: think that the last deep dive we did was, like
Speaker 9: I wouldn't say, like a year ago when Ron DeSantis,
Speaker 9: then presidential.
Speaker 2: Hopeful meatball Rod Garrison, meatball rock me.
Speaker 3: Sorry, sorry, my polity is putting.
Speaker 9: Ron just embraced the fast wave like meme asthetic for
Speaker 9: his then failing and dying campaign. And that was kind
Speaker 9: of the last that we did one of these big
Speaker 9: deep dives into like how meme politics currently operate.
Speaker 3: And it's been a long year.
Speaker 9: It's felt in some ways much longer than a year
Speaker 9: since then, and the meme landscape has changed significantly, And
Speaker 9: that's kind of what I want to discuss today. Just
Speaker 9: go over the current state of meme politics in September
Speaker 9: twenty twenty two.
Speaker 2: Great, it's like the State of the Union, but slightly dumber.
Speaker 9: But for us, yeah, just for all, for the completely
Speaker 9: brain rods, yeah space of online politics, people.
Speaker 2: Who have destroyed their minds by spending too much time
Speaker 2: on the internet.
Speaker 9: Yes, exactly so now that most of these like jokes
Speaker 9: and references will be talking about are actually really old
Speaker 9: and not actually relevant anymore and are no longer trending.
Speaker 9: Now we can talk about how they worked, if they worked,
Speaker 9: and what they can tell us about the changing landscape
Speaker 9: of meme politics in the Year of Our Lord twenty
Speaker 9: twenty four and beyond. So let's start by going all
Speaker 9: the way back to July fifteenth, which was just a
Speaker 9: lifetime ago.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was a thousand years ago. Yes, this was.
Speaker 9: This was the first day of the RNC. Vance Is
Speaker 9: announced as Trump's running mate. This was before Biden dropped
Speaker 9: out of the race, but when we were pretty sure
Speaker 9: that he was probably going to hopefully.
Speaker 2: That's interesting that you were pretty shit because I I
Speaker 2: kind of thought he was going to like make us
Speaker 2: like fucking hoist his corpse back into the white asse.
Speaker 9: I mean, we got a really good indication about five
Speaker 9: days later that his dropout was like imminent. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 9: you're right, and it happened. It happened less than a
Speaker 9: week later, So it was it was really on the line.
Speaker 9: But anyway, it was. It was a it was a
Speaker 9: very different world, very different time. Meanwhile, on the first
Speaker 9: day of the RNC, after vance Is announced as the
Speaker 9: Republican VP candidate, the Twitter user Rick Rud's Calves posted
Speaker 9: this tweet quote, I can't say for sure, but he
Speaker 9: might be the first VP pick to have admitted in
Speaker 9: a New York Times bestseller to fucking and insight out
Speaker 9: Latex Glove shoved in between two couch cushions Vance Hillbilly Elogy,
Speaker 9: pages one seventy nine to one eighty one. So this
Speaker 9: is this is the start of the couch meme. Sure
Speaker 9: the next few days, the memes spread online with the
Speaker 9: help of liberals who were unable to detect the fictitious
Speaker 9: nature of the claim. Now, unronic spread is crucial to
Speaker 9: the success of mimetic attacks like this, and the couch
Speaker 9: fucking claims gained such widespread prominence on Twitter that on
Speaker 9: July twenty fifth, the AP decided to do an official
Speaker 9: fact check of the claim, running the headline no, JD.
Speaker 9: Vans did not have sex with a couch. Now this
Speaker 9: had two problems. By platforming this story in the AP,
Speaker 9: the image of JD's couch coitus was propelled outside the
Speaker 9: confines of overly online and Twitter shit posters into the
Speaker 9: popular discourse. Now the topic was welcome on news shows,
Speaker 9: talk shows, and other respectable publications. The other problem is
Speaker 9: that you can't defit say JD Vance has never had
Speaker 9: sex with a couch.
Speaker 2: No, no, I say I would never say that. You
Speaker 2: can say it's untrue.
Speaker 9: He wrote about sofa sex in his memoir, right, but
Speaker 9: not that he's one hundred percent never made love to
Speaker 9: a love seat.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so making matters worse.
Speaker 9: Hours later, the AP removed their fact check, leaving a
Speaker 9: web page that just read quote, this story did not
Speaker 9: go through our standard editing processes and has been removed.
Speaker 2: I gotta know, I do desperately want to know what
Speaker 2: actually happened in the background there.
Speaker 3: It's it's quite funny. It's it's quite a big fuck up. Now.
Speaker 9: This led people to reasonably conclude that if the fact
Speaker 9: check was taken down, that really only leads us to
Speaker 9: believe one thing is that this is a true claim,
Speaker 9: which at this point many people knew that it's not.
Speaker 9: I think interestingly, jd Vance has refused to comment on
Speaker 9: this claim, which is probably smart, but his continued refusal
Speaker 9: to even deny the claim adds a bit to the
Speaker 9: humorous nature. So the retraction of this fact check became
Speaker 9: a news story itself and gave a whole new life
Speaker 9: to a meme that had kind of been reaching the
Speaker 9: end of its cycle. People created doctored pages of Vance's
Speaker 9: book Hill Billy Elegy, where he reflected on tales of
Speaker 9: his youth in Ohio, where it was commonplace for young
Speaker 9: boys rejected by girls to turn to couch cushions for
Speaker 9: sexual pleasure. The fake pages were framed as a limited
Speaker 9: first edition of the book before per Teal found it
Speaker 9: and revised the book for a secondary, wide released copy
Speaker 9: the next week. The meme continued to proliferate, having completely
Speaker 9: broken out of the Twitter ship posting bubble it was
Speaker 9: birthed in, but the peak of the meme was still
Speaker 9: to come. On August sixth, Kamala Harris announced Minnesota Governor
Speaker 9: Tim Walls as her running mate, and the two appeared
Speaker 9: together at a rally in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. During Walls's first speech,
Speaker 9: he made a very safe kind of dead Oak style
Speaker 9: reference to his vice presidential opponent's viral sticky sofa situation.
Speaker 11: Like all regular people I grew up with in the Heartland,
Speaker 11: JD studied at Yale, had his career funded by Silicon
Speaker 11: Valley billionaires, and then wrote a best seller trashing that community.
Speaker 11: Come on, that's not what Middle America is. And I
Speaker 11: gotta tell you I can't wait to debate the guy,
Speaker 11: that is, if he's willing to get off the couch
Speaker 11: and show up, you'll see what.
Speaker 8: I did there.
Speaker 9: So, due to the references kind of like explicit sexual context,
Speaker 9: this was a bit of an unexpected move.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you could say that.
Speaker 9: But for those already familiar with the meme, the bit
Speaker 9: served as a humorous yet tame in joke, and for
Speaker 9: those unfamiliar, the huge crowd reactions and prompted others to
Speaker 9: inquire about the context for the whole jd vance couch thing,
Speaker 9: once again boosting its popularity as a trend. Now, I
Speaker 9: think this was a bit of a gamble from Walls definitely,
Speaker 9: as acknowledging a viral meme often leads to its impending death,
Speaker 9: where recognition and participation of viral trends from the mainstream
Speaker 9: establishment signal that something is no longer cool and is
Speaker 9: now instead cringe Now. Part of the long lasting presence
Speaker 9: of the coconut tree meme is the Harris campaign's wise
Speaker 9: unwillingness to make continuing coconut tree references or capitalize on
Speaker 9: its imagery. The White House going all in on Dark
Speaker 9: Brandon using the imagery for merch and Biden increasingly making
Speaker 9: references to the meme and interviews and.
Speaker 2: Speeches, Oh, I've just killed a dead nuked.
Speaker 9: It exactly ultimately led to this meme's death long before
Speaker 9: the death of the Biden campaign itself. But this could
Speaker 9: be like a delicate balance. Before Biden made a dark
Speaker 9: Brandon one of the early chrostic images associated with his
Speaker 9: twenty twenty five for re election campaign, the first few
Speaker 9: dark branded references from the White House actually increased the
Speaker 9: memes spread, and I think this is where Walls's joke
Speaker 9: was able to succeed. The couch reference was vague enough
Speaker 9: and disconnected from the more explicit aspects of the meme,
Speaker 9: and paired with Walls's goofy facial expressions and his kind
Speaker 9: of dad joke refrain of see what I did there,
Speaker 9: it made what could have been a cringe and or
Speaker 9: crude moment into a charismatic and endearing one. I think
Speaker 9: the other thing that makes me lean towards Walls's invocation
Speaker 9: of the couch helping more than herting, is that the
Speaker 9: meme had already begun to be legitimized by the establishment
Speaker 9: when it's the subject of an article in every major
Speaker 9: publication and Stephen Colbert is making couch jokes on TV,
Speaker 9: then it is already broken containment and hit the mainstream.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I would also add, I think there's a degree to which,
Speaker 2: like the dark Brandon stuff was cringey so fast, because
Speaker 2: it was very clearly the Biden campaign jumping on to
Speaker 2: a meme that Biden himself certainly didn't understand absolutely not,
Speaker 2: Whereas I think Walls got a little bit of the
Speaker 2: kind of energy Trump used to get in part because
Speaker 2: it was it was like such a I can't believe
Speaker 2: this is happening in American politics. The VP candidate for
Speaker 2: the DIMS just accused the Republican VP candidate having sex
Speaker 2: with the couch like it was such a wow. This
Speaker 2: is like the breaking of a seal kind of moment
Speaker 2: which normally the Republicans have kind of had to themselves
Speaker 2: these like yes, line crossing moments, And I think that
Speaker 2: does get attention and energy.
Speaker 3: To you.
Speaker 2: It was interesting to see them do it and have
Speaker 2: it actually work.
Speaker 9: Yeah, well, we'll talk about that a little bit later.
Speaker 9: How this sort of tactic has been almost entirely monopolized
Speaker 9: by the right to the past decade and just now
Speaker 9: we're starting to see someone that's change. I think Tim
Speaker 9: Wall's making a single Couched reference I believe did very
Speaker 9: little to hurt the inevitable trajectory of the JD Vance
Speaker 9: Couch meme. In the days after the speech, searches for
Speaker 9: JD Vance Couch reached an all time high, and as
Speaker 9: is the nature for peaks, was followed by a gradual
Speaker 9: fall off during the month of August. But crucially, the
Speaker 9: spirit of the meme never really fully went away. I
Speaker 9: think one aspect that separates the couch meme from Dark
Speaker 9: Branded and even Coconut Tree to some degree is that
Speaker 9: it's not based on trying to prop up a political
Speaker 9: figure like Positively, but is instead attacking a widely disliked
Speaker 9: figure with slanderous disinformation. And though the couch meme is
Speaker 9: well past its peak, there's been no shortage of ways
Speaker 9: to make fun of JD.
Speaker 3: Vance.
Speaker 9: The overall momentum against him specifically has continued on utilizing
Speaker 9: memes with a true, untrue, and semi true basis, whether
Speaker 9: that be his inability to order donuts or his legitimately
Speaker 9: possible interest in dolphin sex as evidenced by his Twitter searches.
Speaker 9: Do you know who also likes dolphin sex.
Speaker 3: Robert.
Speaker 2: I mean, I could be convinced, but I guess let's
Speaker 2: check out these ads anyway.
Speaker 3: All right, we are so back.
Speaker 9: So the right did not take kindly to Walls's acknowledgment
Speaker 9: of the whole sofa spectacle.
Speaker 3: We were so pissed. They were really pissed. And it's funny.
Speaker 9: It's like as if their main guy has not spent
Speaker 9: the last ten years making up wild and spewing all
Speaker 9: sorts of like offensive lies about his opponents.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's why they're pissed. Yeah, we're supposed to be
Speaker 2: the ones doing this.
Speaker 9: So in response, the online right's finest posters cooked up
Speaker 9: a memetic counter attack against Tim Walls. And what they
Speaker 9: decided on is that Tim Walls once had to get
Speaker 9: his stomach pumped from drinking a gallon of horse seamen
Speaker 9: with this meme originating from a fake screenshot of an
Speaker 9: AP fact check posted by the Twitter account National Conservatism.
Speaker 2: See, uh, I'm sure you're going to get into it.
Speaker 2: But there's so many reasons why this was always destined
Speaker 2: not to work.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Absolutely, Almost immediately this was seen as like a massive misfire.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, it made it immediately clear, Oh, you guys
Speaker 2: don't understand why what you used to do, like what
Speaker 2: you were doing was working. Yeah, like you never actually
Speaker 2: understood the principles behind what you were playing around with.
Speaker 9: And I think crucially, most of the attacks from these
Speaker 9: like weird online figures never actually caught that much traction.
Speaker 9: The only ones that succeeded were ones that were just
Speaker 9: pairting stuff that Trump was talking about, because I think
Speaker 9: Trump actually understands this line of attack much better than
Speaker 9: most of these like right wing posters do. But yeah,
Speaker 9: it was very clear that this was a failure. Some
Speaker 9: of the first horse Seamen posts got immediately ratioed by
Speaker 9: replies and quote tweets, deeming the meme a manufactured and
Speaker 9: desperate attempt to respond to the natural growth of the
Speaker 9: couch hooks from a random Twitter shit post to the
Speaker 9: Democratic vice presidential candidate's opening speech with.
Speaker 2: A guy like Walls, you don't go with horse com
Speaker 2: you do something like you you start spreading a rumor
Speaker 2: that like he uh cooked a bunch of well done
Speaker 2: t bone steaks at a barbecue or totally like that,
Speaker 2: totally like something that really hits to the center of
Speaker 2: his dad core thing it has. It has to line
Speaker 2: up with his vibe right right, right, and his vibe
Speaker 2: is like you know that nice Midwestern dad who's a
Speaker 2: dog shit cook, right like.
Speaker 9: Yeah, which is some thing that Walls has actually been
Speaker 9: able to like utilize himself with his like white guy
Speaker 9: tacos and stuff right like.
Speaker 2: Right right exactly. He's leaded into it very smartly.
Speaker 9: He lead into it, and then it becomes a strength
Speaker 9: that then the right also gets upset about accusing him
Speaker 9: of quote unquote anti white racism.
Speaker 2: That was quite a moment for American political history.
Speaker 9: The other thing with like this horse semen thing is
Speaker 9: like you simply just can't force these things to happen.
Speaker 9: Like a crucial part of the success of a political
Speaker 9: meme like this is that it must have a degree
Speaker 9: of unirnic spread by people who genuinely believe it to
Speaker 9: be true. Now, the horse semen meme was also intended
Speaker 9: to counter the Republican or weird talking point that picked
Speaker 9: up steam this summer, and for some reason, they chose
Speaker 9: to go about this by making an escalatory and just
Speaker 9: grossly bizarre claim about Tim Wall's guzzling animal semen. Masterful
Speaker 9: gambitzer not a weird thing to say at all. No,
Speaker 9: in doing this, the right displayed a fundamental misunderstanding of
Speaker 9: why the Jdvan's couch story was successful. The reason why
Speaker 9: it caught on despite the easily verifiable fact that Jadvance
Speaker 9: did not write about pleasuring himself with a couch as
Speaker 9: a teenager, is that Jadvance seems like the kind of
Speaker 9: guy to have used a couch to masturbate as a
Speaker 9: teenager in rural Ohio.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know that adolescence was awkward as.
Speaker 9: Shit, absolutely, Like it wasn't successful just because it was
Speaker 9: like a weird sex story. It evoked a genuine and
Speaker 9: feeling of something a sort of like white trash young
Speaker 9: guy might do. On the other hand, swallowing a gallon
Speaker 9: of horse seamen, it's such an outlandish jump into fantasy
Speaker 9: by comparison.
Speaker 2: Yeah, nobody has done that, right. Well, well, Tim Walls
Speaker 2: is no mister hands. The vibes simply do not match.
Speaker 2: And to be clear, Garre said, mister Hans wasn't swallowing it.
Speaker 2: That was part of the problem.
Speaker 9: That is true, And like, meanwhile, Vance has the exact
Speaker 9: vibe of like a gross little teen gremlin who fucked
Speaker 9: it inside out. Rubber gloves shoved between two couch cushions.
Speaker 9: So the horse even meme failed to reach outside the
Speaker 9: confines of niche right wing Twitter, but conservatives had another
Speaker 9: meme up their sleeve. Chronically online far right influencers Cat
Speaker 9: Turre a CHAIAI Check aka Lips of TikTok and Ian
Speaker 9: Miles Chung led the charge in branding Tim Walls as
Speaker 9: tampon Tim in reference to a bill Walls assigned requiring
Speaker 9: menstrual products be provided in schools. Oh the horror, The
Speaker 9: Babylon b wrote JD. Vans is weird. It says guy
Speaker 9: who signed bill to put tampons in boys' school bathroom unquote.
Speaker 9: So similar to the horse thing, this attempt to frame
Speaker 9: Tim Walls is weird just didn't work that the meme
Speaker 9: never caught on beyond its initial posts. I think part
Speaker 9: of the reason why the overly online right is so
Speaker 9: focused on painting Walls is weird is not just revenge
Speaker 9: for the couch joke, but because Tim Walls is often
Speaker 9: credited with popularizing the quote Republicans are just plain weird
Speaker 9: line of attack, something that's really caught on this past summer. Now,
Speaker 9: the oldest clip I can find of Tim Walls positing.
Speaker 9: This message comes from December of twenty twenty three. I'll
Speaker 9: include that clip here.
Speaker 12: And you said, basically, there's no such thing as a
Speaker 12: generic Republican.
Speaker 3: These guys are weird.
Speaker 4: Once they start running, their weirdness shows up.
Speaker 3: What do you mean, well, you have weird?
Speaker 8: Stand by that?
Speaker 11: Well, well, look just the strange things they become obsessed with,
Speaker 11: demonizing our children, becoming obsessed with people's personal lives in
Speaker 11: their bedrooms, restricting freedoms. I'm surrounded by states who are
Speaker 11: spending their time figuring out how to ban Charlotte's Web
Speaker 11: in their schools. Why we're banishing hunger from ours with
Speaker 11: free breakfast and launch. That's what the public's looking for,
Speaker 11: That's what they're trying to get to. And they will
Speaker 11: weirdly obsess with everything to be mean and cruel and
Speaker 11: small in their ideas. And I didn't hear anything last
Speaker 11: night that did anything different to that, so I'll stand
Speaker 11: by that. I just think Americans know this is just
Speaker 11: weird stuff to be focused on.
Speaker 9: Now we on nickod happen here and behind the Bastards
Speaker 9: have similarly been advocating for this type of framing for
Speaker 9: the New Right for quite a long while, Like Robert,
Speaker 9: I know you've been like really pushing for this as
Speaker 9: a tactic for years now.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if they'd made me the vice presidential candidate three
Speaker 2: years ago, I really could have made some progress on this,
Speaker 2: but had to see what they've got up.
Speaker 9: Like, we decided on the name from Alli's new show,
Speaker 9: like very early this year, Like this was way way
Speaker 9: before like the Weird Attacks went viral.
Speaker 2: It's really the only name we ever considered was weird
Speaker 2: Little Guys.
Speaker 9: Yeah, because that's how we like internally refer to these freaks.
Speaker 9: Because these are all unhinged, anti social freaks, and many
Speaker 9: of them revel in being this antagonistic force. I think
Speaker 9: part of their self image is the idea that liberals
Speaker 9: find them dangerous, and the Weird Attack is very disempowering
Speaker 9: for these people. It reframes them from this like scary
Speaker 9: existential threat to being more akin to your just off putting,
Speaker 9: creepy uncle. Here's a clip of Wals himself kind of
Speaker 9: explaining the methodology behind this attack.
Speaker 13: You've gotten some attention this week for calling Trump Advance
Speaker 13: and Republicans in general weird, and I think that You're
Speaker 13: the one that set this tone, and there's this shift.
Speaker 13: The Harris campaign seems to be following your lead, echoing
Speaker 13: this language. Why do you think weird a more effective
Speaker 13: attack line against Trump and what Democrats have been done previously,
Speaker 13: which is argue that he's an existential threat to democracy.
Speaker 11: Yeah, and it's an observation on this, and you know,
Speaker 11: being a school teacher, I see a lot of things.
Speaker 11: But my point on this was is people kept talking about, look,
Speaker 11: Donald Trump is going to put women's lives at risk.
Speaker 11: That's one hundred percent true. Donald Trump is potentially going
Speaker 11: to end constitutional liberties that we have, end voting. I
Speaker 11: do believe all those things are a real possibility, but
Speaker 11: it gives him way too much power.
Speaker 8: Listen to the guy.
Speaker 11: He's talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks and just
Speaker 11: whatever crazy thing pops into his mind. And I thought,
Speaker 11: we just give him way too much credit. And I
Speaker 11: think one of the things is is when you just
Speaker 11: ratchet down some of the you know, the scariness or whatever,
Speaker 11: and just name it what it is. I got to
Speaker 11: tell you my observation on this is, have you ever
Speaker 11: seen the guy laugh?
Speaker 3: That seems very weird?
Speaker 11: To me that an adult can go through six and
Speaker 11: a half years of being in the public eye if
Speaker 11: he has left it's at someone, not with someone. That
Speaker 11: is weird behavior. And I don't think you call it
Speaker 11: anything else. It is simply what we're observing.
Speaker 8: Now.
Speaker 9: An interesting side effect of the weird framing is that
Speaker 9: it's left these ultra conservatives utterly incapable of effectively combating
Speaker 9: this line of attack. They've been so used to being
Speaker 9: on the offense that they never really prepared for the
Speaker 9: position that they're now stuck in. Over a decade of
Speaker 9: they go low, we go high, conditioned the rights to
Speaker 9: be completely unable to cope with being put on mimetic defense.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 9: My favorite retort of the weird claim is from conservative
Speaker 9: pundent Helen Andrew, who wrote, quote, calling people weird is
Speaker 9: such feminine behavior. Textbook sex difference. Men engage in open conflict,
Speaker 9: women police conformity. It's honestly disorienting to hear male politicians
Speaker 9: use the line.
Speaker 2: I love too that we're talking about how men are
Speaker 2: naturally drawn to open, honorable conflict when talking about a
Speaker 2: bunch of people who never log off, like everything you.
Speaker 3: Do is find the keyboard motherfucker.
Speaker 9: It's amazing that they're combating this by saying the weirdest
Speaker 9: things imaginable.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Now, I think this one's only one uped by a
Speaker 9: reply to this very post by the author of the
Speaker 9: self published Kingmaker trilogy named Airy Mendelssohn Christ who posted
Speaker 9: a meme featuring a crowd of NPC wojacks all saying
Speaker 9: the word weird, which which I find actually be a
Speaker 9: very powerful image depicting all the masses having agreed upon
Speaker 9: that Republicans are weird. But Mendelssohn wrote quote, it's both
Speaker 9: feminine behavior and heard behavior. They all started calling them
Speaker 9: weird at once. It was obviously planned, cooked up by
Speaker 9: a sophisticated wordsmith, and then distributed by their network.
Speaker 2: Yes, only the most sophisticated of wordsmiths knows the word weird.
Speaker 3: It's amazing.
Speaker 2: You've got to dig deep into the dictionary to hit
Speaker 2: that one.
Speaker 9: Truly, truly, truly, this must be the work of a
Speaker 9: sophisticated word smith.
Speaker 3: It's it's phenomenal, that's fucking funny.
Speaker 9: So in trying to combat the weird accusation, the right
Speaker 9: has mostly opted for either responding with escalation, like in
Speaker 9: the case of the horse seamen meme, which only makes
Speaker 9: them seem kind of more off putting, or just going
Speaker 9: for the classic Uno reverso right, I'm not weird, you're weird.
Speaker 9: This is the ultimate sign of desperation and impending defeat.
Speaker 9: I am rubber, you are glue. Whatever you say bounces
Speaker 9: off me and sticks to you. On top of being
Speaker 9: a strategy that often signals one has already lost. By
Speaker 9: employing this tactic, you make the very basic error of
Speaker 9: repeating the enemy's claim against you, thus continuing to amplify
Speaker 9: and spread the original attack.
Speaker 3: Here's a clip from Trump.
Speaker 14: There's something weird with that guy. He's a weird guy.
Speaker 14: JD is not weird. He's a solid rock. I happen
Speaker 14: to be a very solid rock. We're not weird. We're
Speaker 14: other things, perhaps, but we're not weird. But he is
Speaker 14: a weird guy. He walks on the stage. Is something
Speaker 14: wrong with that guy? And he called me weird? And
Speaker 14: then the frank news media picks it up. That was
Speaker 14: the word of the day, weird, weird, weird. They're all
Speaker 14: go on now.
Speaker 9: Similarly, I found a Megan Kelly video titled Tucker Carlson
Speaker 9: explains why JD Vance is actually normal?
Speaker 2: Great should Tucker notes the most normal man alive.
Speaker 9: And Trump supporters have brought signs to his rallies that
Speaker 9: read Donald Trump is not weird. My I Am not
Speaker 9: weird shirt has people asking a lot of questions are
Speaker 9: already answered by my shirt. It's it's a very a
Speaker 9: very basic mistake. Now, there has been some pushback among
Speaker 9: certain swasp people on the left who have historically associated
Speaker 9: themselves as like societal outcasts and have found comfort in
Speaker 9: embracing words like weird and freak, and on a certain level,
Speaker 9: I understand this, but I think this point of view
Speaker 9: is making the same fundamental error as the conservative right
Speaker 9: when they try to flip around the weird accusation onto Democrats, progressives,
Speaker 9: and people on the left by primarily using homophobia and transphobia.
Speaker 9: We're using the same word to refer to two very
Speaker 9: different things. Do they call drag Queen's weird for being transgressive? Meanwhile, Trump,
Speaker 9: Advance and the far right are weird because they are
Speaker 9: oddly reactionary. They're trying to resurrect a long dead world
Speaker 9: by forming an authoritary movement behind a reality TV star
Speaker 9: who sounds like you're rambling conspiracy theorist uncle. It's a
Speaker 9: battle over the terrain of normalcy as a shifting category.
Speaker 9: And while I sympathize with some hostility to the hegemony
Speaker 9: of normalcy, how I often follow outside that category. I
Speaker 9: believe it's also paramount that we sabotage reactionary efforts to
Speaker 9: gain any territory. So that's kind of the cycle of
Speaker 9: weird And we will be back to talk about this
Speaker 9: kind of final new stage of meme politics after this break. Okay,
Speaker 9: we are once again, so back now. I believe this
Speaker 9: election will truly be characterized by the complete perliferation of
Speaker 9: meme style politics. Now, even without like the use of
Speaker 9: a meme image, I think politics, especially this year, has
Speaker 9: itself functioned and spread like a meme.
Speaker 12: Now.
Speaker 9: This is something that's been happening for the past like
Speaker 9: eight years, certainly, but the way it's happened this summer,
Speaker 9: I think has been slightly unique. The Weird attack is,
Speaker 9: you know, the ideal example of this. But even if
Speaker 9: you just look back a few months ago, we were
Speaker 9: in a very different position. It was a very different story,
Speaker 9: and I'll let Stephen Colbert demonstrate that.
Speaker 15: So the Biden campaign wants to build on the new
Speaker 15: viral trend of handground Pa the phone because reportedly they're
Speaker 15: looking for.
Speaker 3: A meme page manager.
Speaker 15: So look forward to some hot new Biden's social content
Speaker 15: like Irmagird, Trumper's hurdler I can't has youth votes, and
Speaker 15: of course for the very online skibbitty Biden Biden.
Speaker 12: Gwity Biden t dog.
Speaker 9: Okay, I I really want to play more of that cliff,
Speaker 9: but I'm afraid I already included a little too much.
Speaker 3: What a dire situation that is?
Speaker 9: That is that that is the peak of the liberals,
Speaker 9: mimetic attacks, just truly episcopal. Oh my god, I've become
Speaker 9: obsessed with skibbitty Biden just because it demonstrates such like
Speaker 9: an inevitable like self defeat that that was like the
Speaker 9: best thing these people had, like cooking. As it's kind
Speaker 9: of obvious by the clip. This led towards the death
Speaker 9: of the Biden campaign. They really had nothing in the tank.
Speaker 9: Biden was a shambling old man. And then like two
Speaker 9: months later, Kamala kicked off her campaign by embracing the
Speaker 9: Kamala is Brat Summer, which yes to may have killed
Speaker 9: Bratt Summer but it did help secure the vibe shift,
Speaker 9: skyrocketing her popularity.
Speaker 2: Quite frankly, I was ready for bratt summer today.
Speaker 9: Yes, sure, but I think her weaponization of that term,
Speaker 9: endorsed by Charlie XCX, I think did help skyrocket her
Speaker 9: early popularity and showed an early embrace of online culture.
Speaker 9: And I believe the Harris campaign actually owes a lot
Speaker 9: more to memes. In a ironic twist of fate, there
Speaker 9: is a compelling argument to be made that Kamala Harris's
Speaker 9: rise to the top of the presidential ticket can at
Speaker 9: least be in part tracked back to Republican attacks which
Speaker 9: spawned memes. Last year. The account RNC Research, ran by
Speaker 9: the GOP posted multiple clips and edits attacking Kamala Harris
Speaker 9: for what they saw as odd phrases and awkward moments.
Speaker 9: Earlier this year, some of those videos from RNC research
Speaker 9: went viral outside of right wing Twitter, which led to
Speaker 9: an ironic or post ironic embrace of Kamala Harris among
Speaker 9: liberal and leftist posters. Now the biggest one was the
Speaker 9: Coconut Tree video, which spawned memes that started to pick
Speaker 9: up steam in January and didn't peak until July. Another
Speaker 9: one of RNZ Research's videos, a four minute compilation of
Speaker 9: Kamala Harris saying what can be unburdened by what has
Speaker 9: been provided the inspiration for the title of a document
Speaker 9: that spread around political circles postulating Kamala Harris as the
Speaker 9: best successor to Biden if you were to drop out
Speaker 9: of the race instead of a messy last minute primary
Speaker 9: or an open convention. And I think these memes did
Speaker 9: a lot to increase Kamala's favorability in the first half
Speaker 9: of this year. Kamala prior to this was a relatively
Speaker 9: kind of disliked figure nationally. She was one of the
Speaker 9: first drop out of the twenty twenty presidential race.
Speaker 2: Yeah, she wasn't I wouldn't even say disliked as much
Speaker 2: as like not figure like the big The number one
Speaker 2: thing people said about her is that she's been a
Speaker 2: non entity as a vice president.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, And she certainly wasn't popular. Yes, definitely not popular.
Speaker 9: So although the GP may have inadvertently helped to improve
Speaker 9: the public profile of Kamala Harris and have failed to
Speaker 9: effectively combat the weird attacks, they have not totally failed
Speaker 9: on the me medic warfare front. The past two months,
Speaker 9: the right has landed on a somewhat effective memes style
Speaker 9: politics by utilizing a combination of disinformation and AI images
Speaker 9: to create fake news stories that rile up their base
Speaker 9: on certain key issues so far, mainly trans people and immigration.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 9: A few months ago I did an episode on how
Speaker 9: the Right's been using memes to create this fake epidemic
Speaker 9: of transgender mass shooters, and then in July, a new
Speaker 9: anti trans syop went super viral. False claims that the
Speaker 9: Algerian Olympic boxer Iman Khleif is transgender or in some
Speaker 9: kind of unverified way quote unquote biologically male spread around
Speaker 9: online with the help of British newspapers and went just
Speaker 9: completely viral for a whole week, with the disinformation subsequently
Speaker 9: becoming a news story itself. This fake story caught traction
Speaker 9: after an Italian boxer quit a match forty five seconds
Speaker 9: into a fight after receiving a single hard blow to
Speaker 9: the face. Anti trans memes are a well worn part
Speaker 9: of this type of disinfo ecosystem, and there was no
Speaker 9: shortage of trans sports memes now using Khalif, I'm going
Speaker 9: to quote from Ruby Hammad in Al Jazeera quote Khalif's
Speaker 9: subsequent match was against Hungarian Anna Hamari, who in the
Speaker 9: lead up posted and deleted an image that I believe
Speaker 9: to be among the most significant of the entire affair
Speaker 9: because of how it lays the subtext bear. In this
Speaker 9: AI generated image that Hamari sourced from Instagram, Khalif was
Speaker 9: not merely represented as a man towering over a dainty,
Speaker 9: vulnerable white woman, but was denied humanity altogether and drawn
Speaker 9: as a super natural, mythical beast unquote. Many other AI
Speaker 9: images of Khalif spread throughout this viral trend, some with
Speaker 9: just Khalif having like a stereotypical like male body that
Speaker 9: were AA generated, and others with this like similar like
Speaker 9: like kind of like monster ish look. And I think
Speaker 9: beyond the actual use of these like AI memes and
Speaker 9: kind of anti trans memes using Khalif, I think the
Speaker 9: way the actual story spread was like a meme. I
Speaker 9: think that's how I was able to gain such like
Speaker 9: a viral traction in just like a few days.
Speaker 3: I think.
Speaker 9: The next version of this is the Eating Cat's story,
Speaker 9: which started with a post to a Springfield crime watch
Speaker 9: Facebook group from someone who shared a fourth hand account
Speaker 9: based on a rumor from a neighbor who claims to
Speaker 9: have heard the story from a friend who heard the
Speaker 9: story from an unnamed source. Now NewsGuard attracted down the
Speaker 9: woman who told the Facebook poster about the story, and
Speaker 9: she told them, quote, I'm not sure I'm the most
Speaker 9: credible source because I don't actually know the person who
Speaker 9: lost the cat.
Speaker 3: I don't have any proof.
Speaker 12: In Springfield, they're eating the dogs the people that came in,
Speaker 12: they're eating the cats, they're eating they're eating the pets of.
Speaker 8: The people that live there.
Speaker 16: I just want to clarify here. You bring up Springfield, Ohio,
Speaker 16: and ABC News did reach out to the city manager there.
Speaker 16: He told us there had been no credible reports of
Speaker 16: specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by
Speaker 16: individuals within the immigrant community.
Speaker 8: All I'll seeing people on Tellivien.
Speaker 12: Let me just say this is the people on television
Speaker 12: say my dog was taken and used for food. So
Speaker 12: maybe he said that, and maybe that's a good thing
Speaker 12: to say for a city manager.
Speaker 16: I'm not taking this from television people on television to say.
Speaker 8: Man dog was eaten by the people that went there.
Speaker 9: Meanwhile, the Ohio Division of Wildlife told TMZ that the
Speaker 9: main photo of an alleged Haitian immigrant carrying a debt goose,
Speaker 9: presumably on the way to eat it, was in fact
Speaker 9: a random black man removing roadkill from a street in Columbus, Ohio,
Speaker 9: with no evidence to suggest he is from Haiti, he
Speaker 9: is an immigrant, or was intending to eat said goose.
Speaker 9: Still jd Vance particularly spent a lot of work boosting
Speaker 9: this fake news story.
Speaker 3: Also, if he was, what's wrong with eating a goose?
Speaker 9: Yes, exactly, Like there's there's so many, so many problems
Speaker 9: with the Haitians are eating at pets and wildlife meme,
Speaker 9: and we don't we don't have time to like fully
Speaker 9: get into it. It's just kind of one anecdote in
Speaker 9: this kind of series of mimetic attacks. And I think
Speaker 9: one of the guys who was spearheading this was jd Vance,
Speaker 9: who spent a lot of effort trying to push the
Speaker 9: story into the national spotlight, either the day of or
Speaker 9: before the postential debate of Vans tweeted quote. In the
Speaker 9: last several weeks, my office has received many inquiries from
Speaker 9: actual residents of Springfield who have said their neighbor's pets
Speaker 9: or local wildlife were abducted by Haitian migrants. It's possible,
Speaker 9: of course, that all these rumors will turn out to
Speaker 9: be false. Do you know what's confirmed that a child
Speaker 9: was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right
Speaker 9: to be here unquote, And now I think the last
Speaker 9: thing that he's referring to was an unfortunate car accident,
Speaker 9: and the Haitian man was a legal immigrant, not an
Speaker 9: illegal immigrant. And the father of the child who died
Speaker 9: has been advocating that people stop using his child's death
Speaker 9: as this like racist ammunition in this weird culture war debate.
Speaker 3: God, it's bleak, which is.
Speaker 9: Really hard to see of man pleading that these like
Speaker 9: unhinged racists stop using the death of his son. Yeah,
Speaker 9: to further like they're just extremely gross and like transparent agenda.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's one of the more disgusting things that's happened.
Speaker 9: Part of the spread of the eating a pets story
Speaker 9: has been the use of AI images, particularly of black
Speaker 9: men kidnapping and eating pets, as well as images of
Speaker 9: Trump rescuing cats from what I would describe as a
Speaker 9: horde of immigrants, which is what I would assume the
Speaker 9: AA prompt would be. Now, these images aren't necessarily meant
Speaker 9: to be passed off as real, but in the absence
Speaker 9: of actual evidence, they serve an important purpose of providing
Speaker 9: a visual justice stick in people's minds, and I think
Speaker 9: that that's crucially what's going on with all of these
Speaker 9: AI images, whether they be of Trump, like saving cats
Speaker 9: or holding cats, or they just be like very racist
Speaker 9: depictions of like black men trying to like eat or
Speaker 9: kidnap people's pets. Earlier this year at the RNC, I
Speaker 9: know me and Robert went to this panel produced in
Speaker 9: part by Microsoft talking about the use of like AI
Speaker 9: images in politics and how they're advocating to like, yeah,
Speaker 9: not be using AI AI depictions of candidates, which is
Speaker 9: something that Trump has consistently been doing, posting or retruthing
Speaker 9: AI videos of Kamala Harris of people like Taylor Swift
Speaker 9: endorsing him, which then led to Taylor Swift endorsing Kamala Harris,
Speaker 9: which seemingly upset Trump greatly. Now to me, if you
Speaker 9: look at the trans Olympics debacle as well as the
Speaker 9: Springfield incident, it feels like this like endless series of
Speaker 9: new dis info trends is designed so that individual confrontations
Speaker 9: just don't matter that much. Like, yeah, pointing out the
Speaker 9: whole trans Olympics thing is fake just doesn't matter, because
Speaker 9: then they're going to move on to Haitian immigrants or
Speaker 9: killing people's pets. Each individual lie is so flimsy, but
Speaker 9: the constant sequence of them built a structure that has
Speaker 9: a degree of stability for conservatives, And this is a
Speaker 9: project that they've been like working towards for a long
Speaker 9: long time. I know, Robert, we've talked about this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this, I mean I saw the start of this
Speaker 2: as like a kid, right, like this is kind of
Speaker 2: what what guys like Limbaugh were always doing on sort
Speaker 2: of the ground floor level, you know, you could you
Speaker 2: can look at I think one of the first big
Speaker 2: like cleavage points in our realities was the whole Clinton
Speaker 2: death count thing, which, if you're unaware, is this list
Speaker 2: Conservative started spreading in like nineteen ninety three or four
Speaker 2: of all of the people that Bill and Hillary had
Speaker 2: supposedly had murdered, right, And it was like guys like
Speaker 2: Vince Foster who'd killed himself, who worked for them, and whatnot,
Speaker 2: Like it was all bullshit, but it was kind of
Speaker 2: the start of this, Like, when you get enough of
Speaker 2: these things, it doesn't matter that each of them takes
Speaker 2: seconds to debunk. They form a sort of like I
Speaker 2: a cushion. If you exist within that reality, you can
Speaker 2: kind of slide along without touching the ground.
Speaker 9: And definitely now, yeah, it forms like a mesh like
Speaker 9: net structure that where each individual piece is very weak,
Speaker 9: but together it provides an actually like pretty pretty resilient
Speaker 9: like resting place for these people's alternate version of reality.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Now, Vance is kind of somewhat admitted in some ways
Speaker 9: to having manufactured this media.
Speaker 3: Story was interesting to me.
Speaker 9: Yeah, And I'm going to put that clip here, and
Speaker 9: I'm going to include a bit of a longer clip
Speaker 9: than what's usually used in soundbites, just because during this interview,
Speaker 9: just Vance's behavior and his like pauses are very odd.
Speaker 9: So there's gonna be a few seconds of like dead space.
Speaker 9: But that is like in the actual interview.
Speaker 17: American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and
Speaker 17: I start talking.
Speaker 3: About cat memes.
Speaker 17: If I have to mean create stories so that the
Speaker 17: American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the
Speaker 17: American people, then.
Speaker 18: That's what I'm going to do, Dana, because you just
Speaker 18: said that you're creating a public policy. Sorry, you just
Speaker 18: said that you're creating the story.
Speaker 3: Is that, Dana.
Speaker 18: You just said that this is a story that you created.
Speaker 3: So so then the eating dog are not.
Speaker 8: We are creating we are, Dana.
Speaker 17: It comes from first hand accounts from my constituents. I
Speaker 17: say that we're creating a story, meaning we're creating the
Speaker 17: American media focusing on it.
Speaker 19: Now.
Speaker 9: Vance has subsequently you know, said that no, no, no,
Speaker 9: I'm getting this information from first hand accounts from my constituents.
Speaker 9: When I say that I'm creating stories, I'm creating a
Speaker 9: media story. But it's hard not to see this as
Speaker 9: a little bit of like a tactical slip on his part.
Speaker 9: Right now, this has all created a very odd situation
Speaker 9: for the Republican Party, as we've kind of talked about
Speaker 9: the past few months. Journalists and researcher Jared Holt wrote, quote,
Speaker 9: the Trump campaign seems to be doing the same failed
Speaker 9: dance as the Dessantus one at the moment, pander heavily
Speaker 9: to terminally online weirdos and get mad when the general
Speaker 9: public goes, uh, what the fuck?
Speaker 3: Unquote Yeah, and this is the thing.
Speaker 9: When you have someone on stage talking about eating pets,
Speaker 9: that is a turn off for many normal people because
Speaker 9: they immediately clock this as being.
Speaker 3: Probably complete bullshit.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and we're in a very interesting moment in the
Speaker 9: Republican Party considering the right wings electoral losses in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 9: twenty twenty, twenty twenty two, and possibly going into twenty
Speaker 9: twenty four. This kind of weird culture war grievance, anti
Speaker 9: will strategy just might not be electorally viable when matched
Speaker 9: against a more normal alternative, and I think making matters worse.
Speaker 9: The Trump team and the Republican National Committee have spent
Speaker 9: the past four years handing over a lot of their
Speaker 9: calms and outreach to just certifiable freaks like Laura lumer Ian,
Speaker 9: Miles Chung, and limbs of TikTok, people who are very
Speaker 9: disconnected from what regular people care about, people that are
Speaker 9: only liked by other really online freaks, and.
Speaker 2: People who have no crossover appeal.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 2: Joe Rogan is such a powerful card in their hand
Speaker 2: because he has a lot of normal dude appeal, right,
Speaker 2: and so when he starts parroting a talking point, he
Speaker 2: can actually push it to people Laura Lumer does not
Speaker 2: write like if you show a normal person Laura Lumer,
Speaker 2: they're like, what the fuck is wrong with that lady's face?
Speaker 9: And they're a very double edged sword because although they
Speaker 9: are very off putting and that in some ways can
Speaker 9: like damaged, can damage Trump, they also carry a degree
Speaker 9: of like very real harm. Oh yeah, Whenever all these
Speaker 9: people hop onto a trend, a very consistent thing that
Speaker 9: has followed is bomb threats being called into whatever their
Speaker 9: target is. I love doing that, whether that be hospitals
Speaker 9: providing trans healthcare, abortion clinics, or in this case, just
Speaker 9: schools in Springfield, Ohio, which have now received multiple bomb threats.
Speaker 9: And again, like it is a very double edged sword
Speaker 9: because obviously that's like very real harm being done. And
Speaker 9: you could argue that, you know, that makes the situation
Speaker 9: worse for the Trump campaign, that the fact that their
Speaker 9: attacks that they're spreading are resulting in like bomb threats
Speaker 9: being called into schools, but it also creates a degree
Speaker 9: of actual harm for like kids and many of the
Speaker 9: legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield that are now seeing a
Speaker 9: very unprecedented as of recent wave of like extremely racist attacks.
Speaker 9: There's a good article by Jared Holt in MSNBC that
Speaker 9: kind of goes into this topic specifically that I'll link
Speaker 9: in the sources below. So yeah, that kind of rounds
Speaker 9: up my update on the current state of meme politics,
Speaker 9: all of its various forms that's taken these past few months,
Speaker 9: from couch fucking jokes to bomb threats in Springfield, and
Speaker 9: it's a very dominant form. Like I don't remember memes
Speaker 9: being this front and center at least in the twenty
Speaker 9: twenty election.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I mean they twenty sixteen they kind of were,
Speaker 2: but it was like a much rougher and ruder attempt.
Speaker 2: There's like so much more buy in by like large organizations.
Speaker 3: And Democrats have finally jumped on board to this. Yes, yes, absolutely.
Speaker 9: They have long rejected this line of attack as an
Speaker 9: illegitimate form of politics, and they are not taking that
Speaker 9: stance anymore.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they picked the gun up off the table, fucking finally.
Speaker 9: Well, that at least doesn't for me. Yeah here, it
Speaker 9: could happen here. I will leave us with one closing
Speaker 9: soundbit from JD.
Speaker 19: Vans something that Governor Walls has called you and Donald Trump,
Speaker 19: and that is weird, sure, and it is taken off
Speaker 19: the New York Times reports. Then when Donald Trump was
Speaker 19: asked about it, he said, not me. They're talking about JD.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 17: Certainly they've levied that charge against me more than anybody else.
Speaker 3: Hey, we'll be.
Speaker 2: Back Monday with more episodes every week from now until
Speaker 2: the heat death of the universe.
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