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: Welcome to Dick It Up and Here, a podcast about
Speaker 3: things falling apart and putting it back together again. I'm
Speaker 3: Mia Wong, I'm with Garrison and it is my singular
Speaker 3: honor and pleasure to introduce our guest, doctor Julia Serrano.
Speaker 3: She is the author of many books, excluded Making Feminist
Speaker 3: and queer movements more Inclusive, Sex Stop, How Society Sexualizes us,
Speaker 3: and how we can fight back Outspoken, a Decade of
Speaker 3: transgender activism and Transfeminism, and most famously Whipping Girl, a
Speaker 3: new edition of which is coming out in March. Doctor Serrano,
Speaker 3: welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Hi, thanks for having me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm really really I'm really happy you can join us. So, okay,
Speaker 3: Whipping Girl, I think is really one of quietly the
Speaker 3: most influential books of the twenty first century, to the
Speaker 3: extent that in kind of classic trans woman fashion, I
Speaker 3: don't think. I don't think people realize that the ideas
Speaker 3: that it introduced have an origin. So for people who
Speaker 3: haven't read the book, and you should, this book is great.
Speaker 3: I guarantee you have seen its influence. If you've ever
Speaker 3: heard someone like who's not trans referred to as sis, like,
Speaker 3: that's that's from this book. The concept of misgendering is
Speaker 3: also from this book. The word trans misogyny like also
Speaker 3: from this book. And this I think gets at something
Speaker 3: from the twenty fifteen second edition preface that you wrote,
Speaker 3: which is something I've been wondering about, is what is
Speaker 3: it like to sort of experience writing a book and
Speaker 3: have it just ripple across society like this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's uh.
Speaker 4: I was very much hoping and you know, as I
Speaker 4: was writing it, I was hoping that I thought that
Speaker 4: it would resonate with a lot of trans female and
Speaker 4: trans feminine people and I hope trans communities more generally,
Speaker 4: and the book this is something that a lot of
Speaker 4: times people who pick up the book now, in like
Speaker 4: the twenty twenties don't necessarily realize is that nobody was
Speaker 4: reading anything about trans people outside of feminists and LGBTQ
Speaker 4: plus communities, and so I was basically just speaking to
Speaker 4: those groups, and I thought it would resonate with some people.
Speaker 4: But yeah, definitely, it kind of went out into the
Speaker 4: world and did a bunch of stuff that I wasn't
Speaker 4: necessarily expecting. And I'm very glad that the book has
Speaker 4: kind of touched a lot of people's lives and changed,
Speaker 4: you know.
Speaker 1: Kind of societal.
Speaker 4: Understanding and quote unquote discourses about trans people.
Speaker 5: So yeah, it it must be kind of bizarre, like
Speaker 5: being twenty years ago writing about you know, caniche term
Speaker 5: like cis and now the richest man in the world
Speaker 5: thinks it's like the most evil word.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's quite bizarre, and I do want to definitely
Speaker 4: kind of clear this up, but I kind of make
Speaker 4: this clear in the preface. So I didn't invet like
Speaker 4: sis versus trans like a that's like a prefix that
Speaker 4: has existed a long time. Yeah, and uh, I've since
Speaker 4: seen other people like point out, oh, this person was
Speaker 4: using it in nineteen ninety something, or some German writer
Speaker 4: like coined cis vestism or something like back a million
Speaker 4: years ago. So what I will say is that when
Speaker 4: I when I put out the book, I was inspired
Speaker 4: by Emi.
Speaker 1: Koyama, who was and is an awesome.
Speaker 4: Activist intersex activists, who who's written a lot of really
Speaker 4: influential trans related essays over the years. And it was
Speaker 4: from her blog that was the first time I saw
Speaker 4: SIS and trans and the idea of SIS sexism.
Speaker 1: And at the time, it was while I was.
Speaker 4: Writing the book, and it really I was like, oh
Speaker 4: my god, this is kind of the overall idea. I
Speaker 4: was talking about all these different facets of basically double
Speaker 4: standards between trans and non trans people, and so I
Speaker 4: kind of grabbed on to it, and I was really
Speaker 4: worried about it actually because nobody, almost nobody was using
Speaker 4: those terms. It was very niche at the time, and
Speaker 4: so the book popularized that language. And so now it
Speaker 4: is kind of funny every once in a while seeing
Speaker 4: yes overreactions by SIS people to the idea of SIS
Speaker 4: being a slur or whatever. So yeah, and so yeah,
Speaker 4: so that's definitely something that is kind of is the
Speaker 4: one thing I one thing I did coin in the
Speaker 4: book that has kind of also taken a life on
Speaker 4: its own is trans misogyny.
Speaker 1: So that is something that kind of originated with.
Speaker 4: This book and particularly a chap book that I wrote
Speaker 4: in two thousand and five that some of.
Speaker 1: Those essays became chapters of the book.
Speaker 4: And yeah, and so there are other ideas that kind
Speaker 4: of are out there, Like I think it was one
Speaker 4: of the first I think it was the first book
Speaker 4: to talk about like the idea of sis privilege. Misgendering
Speaker 4: as an idea was out there, but I kind of
Speaker 4: dove into it a little bit deeper. So yeah, so
Speaker 4: there are definitely things I was doing at the time
Speaker 4: that I didn't know whether they'd be to abstract or
Speaker 4: how they'd be taken up.
Speaker 1: And so, yes, it's been very interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I wanted to talk about misgendering a bit because
Speaker 3: I think it's become this word that just means not
Speaker 3: saying someone's pronouns correctly. And I think that's at the
Speaker 3: very best, like an incredibly reductionist and of simplified version
Speaker 3: of the analysis that you were presenting. So I guess
Speaker 3: I have two questions here. One, can you briefly sort
Speaker 3: of talk about what you were trying to get at
Speaker 3: when you sort of did your analysis of the process
Speaker 3: of gendering, And two, what do you think about the
Speaker 3: way that it's kind of become flattened into this I
Speaker 3: don't know, kind of weirdly narrow thing in modern discourse.
Speaker 4: Sure, and a lot of the misgendering definitely dovetails with
Speaker 4: the idea of passing, and a lot of my kind
Speaker 4: of diving into it in a particular way came from
Speaker 4: critiques that I had and other trans people had as well,
Speaker 4: but I kind of, you know, put them together in
Speaker 4: a particularly in the Dismantling I think it's dismantling sexual
Speaker 4: Privileged chapter where I kind of go through all these
Speaker 4: steps that lead to miss gendering, because I think people
Speaker 4: talk about trans people passing and also the people will
Speaker 4: talk about other marginalized groups passing is whatever dominant majority group.
Speaker 4: The term obviously had long been used with regards to
Speaker 4: people of color passing as white and in kind of
Speaker 4: white racist you know, us and other societies. So it's
Speaker 4: an old term, and a big problem with it is
Speaker 4: that it makes it sound like we're doing something active,
Speaker 4: that trans people are actively trying to deceive other people.
Speaker 1: With huge scare quotes around the word deceive.
Speaker 4: And I really wanted to highlight to people that actually
Speaker 4: all of us very unconsciously and very compulsively gender every
Speaker 4: single person we meet, or at least that's how we're
Speaker 4: socialized to be. And you know, you can work towards
Speaker 4: getting you know, overcoming that, but I wanted to really
Speaker 4: highlight the fact that we see people, we automatically gender them,
Speaker 4: and that puts people who do not quite who your
Speaker 4: presumptions are wrong about. It puts us in difficult situations.
Speaker 4: It's a double bind where do you reveal what you
Speaker 4: supposedly really are or do you just allow people to
Speaker 4: read you that way? And it works out very differently,
Speaker 4: for instance, between trans and say CIS gay people, because
Speaker 4: when CIS gay people talk about passing as straight. Their
Speaker 4: passing is something that they know that they are not,
Speaker 4: Whereas for a lot of trans people, people read me
Speaker 4: as a woman and I understand myself to be a woman.
Speaker 4: There's it's a very different dynamic because it's not like
Speaker 4: I'm not hiding anything, but people are presuming what I'm
Speaker 4: really passing as is I'm passing a CIS gender and
Speaker 4: people are assuming I'm sis gender when the trans is
Speaker 4: the thing that I might need to or feel like
Speaker 4: I need to clear up, or other people might put
Speaker 4: pressure on me to either tell them that I'm trans
Speaker 4: or be accused of deceiving them. So that's a little
Speaker 4: bit of kind of how I was approaching it when
Speaker 4: I started working on that idea and really stressing the
Speaker 4: idea of you can't understand miss gendering unless you understand
Speaker 4: that we make assumptions all the time, we gender people
Speaker 4: very actively, and you know, so trans people are often
Speaker 4: just reacting to that and dealing with that double bind.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this is something that I think is interestingly
Speaker 3: discussed in the book about like kind of this this
Speaker 3: issue with some with some of the sort of prevailing
Speaker 3: gender theories, which thought of which to think about sort
Speaker 3: of like femininity and gender is pure performance. But you know,
Speaker 3: and this is I think, like the argument that you
Speaker 3: were making that I think is really interesting is that
Speaker 3: something that I think is is very obvious to trans
Speaker 3: people is that so much of gender is how people
Speaker 3: perceive you and how you know and stuff that like
Speaker 3: you don't have any control over. It's how people sort
Speaker 3: of gender you. It's how people like construct a gender
Speaker 3: around you in ways that you don't really have control over.
Speaker 4: M yeah, and that was a big thing. So in
Speaker 4: kind of I was writing the book in the mid
Speaker 4: two thousands, and so the nineteen ninety is when Judith
Speaker 4: Butler publishes Gender Trouble, which Butler never said all genders
Speaker 4: performance are all genders drag, Yeah, but that is, but
Speaker 4: that those are like slogans or sound bites that other
Speaker 4: people took from their book, right, and they were very
Speaker 4: popular at the time. There's also there's a famous sociological
Speaker 4: article about doing gender, and so people were very focused
Speaker 4: on the way in which we create gender by doing
Speaker 4: it particular ways, and a lot of the slogans within
Speaker 4: trans communities were sort of like, oh, well, you know,
Speaker 4: I just have to do my gender differently, like more transgressively,
Speaker 4: and that will like tear down all of gender. And
Speaker 4: I felt that there was you know, that is an
Speaker 4: aspect of things. And most of us, whether trans or cists,
Speaker 4: most of us have had the experience of maybe trying
Speaker 4: to perform our genders in a particular way in order
Speaker 4: to like, you know, not you know, in order in
Speaker 4: order to get by in the world, in order to
Speaker 4: not be harassed by other people.
Speaker 1: So we've all had that experience. So while that's true, there's.
Speaker 4: The other partner of that dance, and that's perception, and
Speaker 4: we're all perceiving people very actively, and we're like projecting
Speaker 4: our ideas and meanings onto them. And I felt like
Speaker 4: that was being under discussed at the time, and that
Speaker 4: was not only a huge part of Whipping Girl, but
Speaker 4: that's become a part of a lot of my other books,
Speaker 4: like including my most recent book, sext Up, How Society
Speaker 4: Sexualizes us and how we can fight back. One way
Speaker 4: that I would describe that book is it's talking about
Speaker 4: sex and sexuality not from what people do, but from
Speaker 4: how we perceive and interpret sex and sexuality, because there
Speaker 4: are a lot of unconscious ideas, often really horrible ideas,
Speaker 4: really hierarchical ideas that are kind of built into the
Speaker 4: way we view the world. And interrogating that and so yeah,
Speaker 4: that was a very big part of both of The
Speaker 4: Been Girl and then my writings since then.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think I think that is something where things
Speaker 3: have gotten better in terms of in terms of how
Speaker 3: we think about gender, which I don't know, like things
Speaker 3: aren't perfect, but it definitely it definitely improved things.
Speaker 1: A lot agreed We're going.
Speaker 3: To take an ad break, and when we come back,
Speaker 3: we're talking trans misogyny. We're back. Yeah. So the other
Speaker 3: thing I wanted to sort of talk about was I think,
Speaker 3: in like exactly the opposite process that happened to misgendering,
Speaker 3: trans misogyny has become a lot more expansive than your
Speaker 3: original sort of kind of narrow conception of it. And
Speaker 3: I think this has been changing a lot, especially in
Speaker 3: the last about half decade or so. So I was
Speaker 3: wondering what you think about the way that this concept
Speaker 3: has kind of taken on a life of its own
Speaker 3: in recent years and what it's been doing since.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So I feel like trans misogyny that there are a
Speaker 4: lot of different dialogues and discourses about it coming, like
Speaker 4: people coming from different perspectives with it, and some people
Speaker 4: feeling like the world is doing things that I never
Speaker 4: suggested it was doing. It's kind of hard to know
Speaker 4: like where to actually come in on this, But for me,
Speaker 4: when I was first writing about it, I was first
Speaker 4: just noticing that a lot of the quote unquote transphobia
Speaker 4: that I was facing when people know as a trans
Speaker 4: woman was actually a lot of it was just misogyny,
Speaker 4: and a lot of it targeted like kind of my
Speaker 4: femininity rather than my transness, and so I wanted to
Speaker 4: write about that, and kind of the way that I
Speaker 4: framed it in the book was, which I think is
Speaker 4: a really useful kind of model for thinking about it,
Speaker 4: is that there most of the types of sexism that
Speaker 4: feminists have described over the many years fall into two
Speaker 4: sort of camps, one of them being oppositional sexism, which
Speaker 4: is the idea that men and women are kind of
Speaker 4: perfectly opposite, mutually exclusive sexes that have different interests and
Speaker 4: attributes and desires, and so a lot of transphobia and
Speaker 4: homophobia are kind of like built into this idea that
Speaker 4: men and women are completely distinct. And then the other
Speaker 4: one is traditional sexism, which is the idea that femalists
Speaker 4: and femininity are less legitimate than malness and masculinity. And
Speaker 4: a lot of cis feminists have kind of viewed all
Speaker 4: of that as just sexism, right, But when you break
Speaker 4: it down like that, it makes it clear that the
Speaker 4: double bind that a lot of feminists have talked about
Speaker 4: is actually kind of these two different forms of sexism.
Speaker 4: So if assis woman acts appropriately femininely so appropriate with
Speaker 4: scare quotes. If a SIS woman acts femininely, she'll be
Speaker 4: seen as appropriate, but she'll be dismissed because femininity is
Speaker 4: dismissed in our culture. So that's the way that she'll
Speaker 4: be delegitimized. Whereas if she acts in ways that are
Speaker 4: coded as masculine, if she acts assertive or aggressive, then
Speaker 4: people will malign her for being kind of a barrant
Speaker 4: or deviant. Right, and so oppositional sexism helps keep traditional
Speaker 4: sexism in place because you can say that maln is
Speaker 4: and masculinity are superior, but that only works if you
Speaker 4: can also make a clear distinction between you know, those
Speaker 4: people and people are female and feminine. And so I
Speaker 4: think this plays out differently. And I want to be
Speaker 4: really clear about this because some people have interpreted trans
Speaker 4: misogyny to mean that transmeild trans masculine people don't experience misogyny,
Speaker 4: which is something I've never said, and obviously the fact
Speaker 4: that oppositional sexism is a form of sexism, and obviously
Speaker 4: transmeild transmasculine people experience that. But also depending upon how
Speaker 4: you're viewed by other people, I feel like the same
Speaker 4: double pind that affects this woman affects transmeild trans masculine
Speaker 4: people differently, where there's this tendency, like in a lot
Speaker 4: of anti trans discourses to dismiss transmasculine, especially transmasculine youth
Speaker 4: as being merely girls quote unquote who are like, you know,
Speaker 4: misled or seduced by gender ideology, right, And there's a
Speaker 4: lot of real anti feminine and anti misogynistic ideas in
Speaker 4: there in addition to the fact that it misgenders.
Speaker 1: Transmeld transmasculine people.
Speaker 4: Then if trans mail trans masculine people, when when they
Speaker 4: experience transphobia, there's often you know, like they're scene as
Speaker 4: deviant for kind of breaking that role, but often the
Speaker 4: maleness or their masculinity themselves are not, you know, denigrated
Speaker 4: in the same way because being male, being masculine are
Speaker 4: seen as good in our culture. It's just that if
Speaker 4: you trans male, trans masculine, it's like, well, you're quote
Speaker 4: unquote just a woman, so you can't do it. So
Speaker 4: I think it plays out in this very you know,
Speaker 4: complex way for a lot of trans mail trans masculine people,
Speaker 4: I think for trans female and transfeminine people, because our
Speaker 4: crossing of oppositional sexism also involves us kind of moving
Speaker 4: towards the female, towards the feminine, that there's kind of
Speaker 4: those two forces intersect in a way so that it's
Speaker 4: like exacerbated. And some of the ways I talk about
Speaker 4: this in Women Girl is that, well, we live in
Speaker 4: a world where masculinity is seen as natural and femininity
Speaker 4: is seen as artificial, and since trans people are also
Speaker 4: seen as artificial compared to sis gender people, a lot
Speaker 4: of times we're viewed as doubly artificial. Furthermore, the idea
Speaker 4: that women are seen as sex objects whereas men aren't
Speaker 4: seen as sex objects often are transitions or gender transgressions
Speaker 4: towards a female towards a feminine are presumed to be
Speaker 4: driven by sexual motives that can play out in all
Speaker 4: sorts of ways. Whether this is the idea that we're
Speaker 4: like hypersexual or promiscuous, or that we want to be
Speaker 4: sexualized by other people, or you can see it a
Speaker 4: lot with the kind of the transgender predator is often
Speaker 4: coded as like a man who either has some kind
Speaker 4: of fetish or perversion or is just literally deceiving people
Speaker 4: to get into women's restrooms to do something horrific. So
Speaker 4: those are some of the ways that it plays out.
Speaker 4: I feel that sometimes people view it in a cut
Speaker 4: or dried way that either they'll assume that trans misogyny
Speaker 4: means that trans montal, trans masculine people don't experience misogyny,
Speaker 4: which again is not what that's about. Or sometimes people
Speaker 4: will like try to make really clear distinctions. There's kind
Speaker 4: of language like trans misogyny affected versus trans misogyny exempt.
Speaker 1: Are the terms yeah.
Speaker 4: TME and TMA, which are not terms I've used and
Speaker 4: which or that I didn't coin them.
Speaker 1: They're not in the book.
Speaker 4: And I think that when I first saw that language,
Speaker 4: and I've seen people use it in a way that
Speaker 4: appreciates the fact that some people are non binary, so
Speaker 4: it's a non identity based a way.
Speaker 1: Sometimes this can play out in a really cut or
Speaker 1: dried sort of manner that.
Speaker 4: You know, sometimes you know, whether it's intended this way
Speaker 4: or not, it can make it seem that, like, you know,
Speaker 4: just boiling down a really complex experience, people's complex experiences
Speaker 4: with different types of sexism into some people are privileged
Speaker 4: and some people are marginalized, which I think is a
Speaker 4: more general problem that happens kind of throughout all social
Speaker 4: justice movements, so yeah.
Speaker 5: And trans people are not alien to having complex experiences
Speaker 5: be boiled down to three and four letter acronyms, so.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean I.
Speaker 4: Did this in Twitter form, so it was like a thread,
Speaker 4: so like now people can't access threads unless you.
Speaker 1: Have an account with Twitter. And it's from a couple
Speaker 1: of years ago.
Speaker 4: But one of the things that I talked about was
Speaker 4: I wrote this essay about ten years ago about how
Speaker 4: CIS and trans is kind of a useful Those are
Speaker 4: useful terms, but sometimes people fall in between CIS and trans,
Speaker 4: and sometimes they can be used in a way to
Speaker 4: talk about different double standards, like CIS people are treated
Speaker 4: one way, trans people are treated another.
Speaker 1: But sometimes it can be used in.
Speaker 4: Like a sort of reverse discourse way where it's like,
Speaker 4: you know, SIS people of all the privilege, trans people
Speaker 4: of none of the privilege, and it can be used
Speaker 4: to kind of create this strict dichotomy that ends up
Speaker 4: excluding and invisibilizing some people's experiences. And I feel the
Speaker 4: same thing as happening with TMME and TMA. So I
Speaker 4: don't think that those terms need to necessarily be like,
Speaker 4: I don't think there's anything bad about those terms per
Speaker 4: se in and of themselves, but I think sometimes they
Speaker 4: can be used in ways. And part of why I
Speaker 4: reference this the SYS and trans essay that I wrote
Speaker 4: many years ago. It appears in my book Outspoken. I
Speaker 4: forget the complete title right now, which is but the
Speaker 4: reason why I bring that up is so sometimes what
Speaker 4: happens is that when people learn about SIS sexism, SIS
Speaker 4: people might be like, oh, I face the sexism right.
Speaker 4: If I'm a woman and I don't shave my legs,
Speaker 4: I'm facing se sexism. And so then trans people say, yeah,
Speaker 4: but it kind of plays out differently for us, And
Speaker 4: so sometimes in order to stop people from kind of
Speaker 4: making those claims, which I think it is true that
Speaker 4: you know, a woman not shaving their legs, or if
Speaker 4: a man decides to put on a dress one day,
Speaker 4: regardless of whether they're SIS or trans, they could experience
Speaker 4: sis sexism or transphobia, but it plays out differently for
Speaker 4: people who are actually members of that marginalized group. And then
Speaker 4: so then the marginalized group makes a distinction even sharper,
Speaker 4: and it just kind of becomes this uh, escalating situation
Speaker 4: where the language and kind of battles over it become
Speaker 4: even more intense in a recent piece, one of the
Speaker 4: most recent pieces, if you go to like my medium
Speaker 4: site where my essays as we are now is, it
Speaker 4: talks about the trans mass versus trans discourse in terms
Speaker 4: of what I call the cultural feminist doom loop, where
Speaker 4: the doom loop refers to kind of these ideas where
Speaker 4: everyone like both sides are trying to talk about the
Speaker 4: reason why their experiences are legitimate, and then that seems
Speaker 4: as though the other sides are not legitimate, and then
Speaker 4: that kind of cascades in a way that ends up
Speaker 4: not being very productive but takes up.
Speaker 1: A lot of energy on places like Twitter.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think I think that's something we've still
Speaker 3: seen about one trillion times, variety of toxic ways. But
Speaker 3: what isn't toxic is the new third edition of Whipping
Speaker 3: Girl coming out in March with you can ask your
Speaker 3: local bookstore or pre order now. And Yeah join us
Speaker 3: tomorrow for our discussion with doctor Serrano of the Anatomy.
Speaker 1: Of Moral Panics.
Speaker 3: This has been a could happen here. Trans people are great,
Speaker 3: welcome to it could happen here. I'm your host, Mia Long.
Speaker 3: I am happy to be here once again with Garrison
Speaker 3: Davis and doctor Julius Serrano, the author of, among many
Speaker 3: other works, a new edition of Whipping Girl coming out
Speaker 3: in March, so kind of pivoting a bit. One of
Speaker 3: the really bleak aspects of being trans in a hostile
Speaker 3: world is that we've we've effectively been forced to become
Speaker 3: experts in the architects of our own extermination. And I
Speaker 3: think that's a lot of what kind of the new
Speaker 3: afterward to the upcoming twenty twenty four to thirty edition
Speaker 3: of Whipping Girl is about. So, I guess I wanted
Speaker 3: to ask, what do you see as the biggest shifts
Speaker 3: in sort of the struggle for transliberation beat between the
Speaker 3: end of the sort of Mitchfest like fighting overrom Mitchfest
Speaker 3: era that you wrote like Dream, which you sort of
Speaker 3: wrote the second the forward, the preface of the second edition,
Speaker 3: and then the stuff that's happening now is the sort
Speaker 3: of third edition is coming out.
Speaker 4: Sure, I think a huge aspect of transactivism from my
Speaker 4: perspective of like first coming to trans communities in the nineties,
Speaker 4: a lot of nineties and Zero's era transactivism was overcoming
Speaker 4: basically people's ignorance, their lack of awareness about trans people
Speaker 4: and so and this is one of the things that
Speaker 4: you know, Whipping Girl, for example, there are a lot
Speaker 4: of bad ideas about trans people that had been circling,
Speaker 4: lating for a long time, especially with the culmination of
Speaker 4: Janis Raymond's book The Transsexual Empire the late nineteen seventies
Speaker 4: nineteen seventy nine, I think, and that influenced a lot
Speaker 4: of people that say, places like Mishfest that had trans
Speaker 4: women exclusion policies. And I felt like during the nineties
Speaker 4: through the Zeros, we were constantly making gains that was
Speaker 4: largely due to people learning more about us and then
Speaker 4: recognizing basically shared goals, shared things in common. I think
Speaker 4: that trans people are marginalized because of you know, mainstream
Speaker 4: assumptions about sex, gender sexuality, and those assumptions also hurt
Speaker 4: LGBTQIA plus people more broadly, they hurt you know, in
Speaker 4: a sexist world, they hurt you know, cis women, you know,
Speaker 4: all women, all people who move through the world perceived
Speaker 4: as female feminine.
Speaker 1: So we all have this kind of shared thing that
Speaker 1: we're working.
Speaker 4: Towards, and I feel like that was where a lot
Speaker 4: of the progress was happening. And I think what really
Speaker 4: changed in the mid two thousand tens, especially two year
Speaker 4: twenty fifteen, which is literally the year after the so
Speaker 4: called tipping point time age declaring the transgender dipping point
Speaker 4: was when it was the beginning of what I would
Speaker 4: describe as organized anti transactivism, where it wasn't just that
Speaker 4: people didn't like us or they detested us, but it
Speaker 4: was where there was actual coordination between different groups. In
Speaker 4: the afterward, I describe there's the social conservatives and far
Speaker 4: right who have always been anti LGBTQ plus who took
Speaker 4: an even more intense focus on trans people.
Speaker 1: There were groups that at.
Speaker 4: The time that I wrote Whipping Girl, the term turf
Speaker 4: wasn't around, of the term gender critical wasn't around. Now
Speaker 4: we would call them gender critical or trans exclusionary feminists.
Speaker 4: They've become kind of a part of that, and both
Speaker 4: those groups working together.
Speaker 1: In a lot of ways on policies.
Speaker 4: I think one of the things that the average person
Speaker 4: might not know, if you're not like really in kind
Speaker 4: of highly aware of trans communities and issues, is that
Speaker 4: probably behind the scenes, the anti transparent movement has probably
Speaker 4: made more of an impact than any other group, and
Speaker 4: they are very much like the anti vax parent movement,
Speaker 4: where it's a lot of people who are from their standpoint,
Speaker 4: they're just concerned about their children, they want what's best
Speaker 4: for their children, but they actively seek out and often
Speaker 4: get involved in you know, websites, social media forums and
Speaker 4: sometimes actual activist campaigns that buy into a lot of
Speaker 4: ideas that of children being indoctrinated into gender ideology or
Speaker 4: being infected by social contagion. And there's all this pseudoscience
Speaker 4: that rose out of that. So I would say that
Speaker 4: that was the main difference, that there's this organized campaign,
Speaker 4: and this campaign has just grown and grown and grown
Speaker 4: to the point now where it's just this astoundingly large
Speaker 4: moral panic that the types of things that like thirty
Speaker 4: percent of people in our country believe about trans people
Speaker 4: is abhorrent.
Speaker 1: But that's kind of how it played out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, there's there's been a lot of a
Speaker 3: lot of very common, weird pseudoscience myths that sort of
Speaker 3: came out of that. I wanted to talk a little
Speaker 3: bit about quote unquote rapid onset gender dysphoria because that's
Speaker 3: been all over the place. Me There's like a New
Speaker 3: York Times article talking about it, like two weeks ago,
Speaker 3: and it's I don't know, really been a fiasco, especially
Speaker 3: given how unbelievably tenuous the stuff they sort of faked
Speaker 3: or not as say fake, like unbelievably tenuous to like
Speaker 3: quote unquote study they did that got retracted.
Speaker 4: Was Yeah, and this is something that I actually saw
Speaker 4: developing firsthand and then did research on in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1: So let me frame this.
Speaker 4: I'll tell like my personal a short version of my
Speaker 4: oral history of this.
Speaker 1: So it was around.
Speaker 4: Twenty seventeen that I first heard the idea of children,
Speaker 4: you know, becoming trans because of social contagion. And it
Speaker 4: just seemed to come out of the blue. And it's like, what,
Speaker 4: you know, it's gender identity is not contagious. If it was, like,
Speaker 4: you know, trans people would have infected way more than
Speaker 4: like the less than one percent of us that actually exists.
Speaker 5: Not a very effective contagious go yees rising like no,
Speaker 5: like yes, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: It's like, once you start looking at it, it seems
Speaker 4: kind of ridiculous. A lot of it was because well,
Speaker 4: you know, you know, my kid was hanging around a
Speaker 4: transpersoner started watching videos on YouTube, and now they're trans.
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, well, maybe they.
Speaker 4: Were hanging out with that trans friend and watching the
Speaker 4: YouTube videos because they are trans and they just hadn't
Speaker 4: come out yet, or they're just they're still figuring.
Speaker 1: It out anyway. So in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 4: Is when the Lisa Littmann paper on rapid on set
Speaker 4: gender dysphoria came out, and I wrote this essay at
Speaker 4: the time talking about all the things wrong with it.
Speaker 4: And then in twenty nineteen, I'm like, where did these
Speaker 4: ideas come from? And I should say that rap it
Speaker 4: onset gender dysphoria is basically transgender social contagion wrapped up
Speaker 4: in a medical sounding diagnosis.
Speaker 1: Okay, so if you read.
Speaker 4: The initial descriptions of transgender social contagion and the description
Speaker 4: of rapid onset gender dysphoria, they're basically the same. It's
Speaker 4: that kids are infecting one another. But the idea of
Speaker 4: rap it on set gender dysphoria was meant to describe
Speaker 4: this quick infection of transness that supposedly was happening, and
Speaker 4: sowenty nineteen, I basically did a deep dive. I'm not
Speaker 4: an investigative reporter, but that's kind of what I did
Speaker 4: into like, where the origin of this was, And basically
Speaker 4: all of this kind of came down to the website
Speaker 4: Fourth Wave Now, which often worked in coordination with two
Speaker 4: other anti transparent websites. So Fourth Wave Now is an
Speaker 4: anti transparent website, arguably the very first one that came out,
Speaker 4: and a parent posted the idea that her child was
Speaker 4: like being infected by transgender social contagion, and it's almost
Speaker 4: definitely clear. Now I will leave a little caveat even
Speaker 4: though I think the evidence is pretty strong that that
Speaker 4: was Lisa Marciano, who's anti trans therapist, who's very very
Speaker 4: involved in anti transactivism right now, Okay, so and like
Speaker 4: all everything points to that being her, and she also
Speaker 4: seems to have in some capacity worked with Lisa Littman.
Speaker 4: So basically the first paper about rapet on sitt gender
Speaker 4: distory that came out was not Lisa Littman's, it was
Speaker 4: actually Lisa Marchiano's, which came out twenty seventeen. So it
Speaker 4: basically kind of grew from these anti transparent websites it
Speaker 4: really quickly within six months. Not only was Lisa Littman
Speaker 4: doing her survey, Lisa Littman being someone who has no
Speaker 4: experience in trans health ever before then just decides to
Speaker 4: go in and only survey parents from an ant from
Speaker 4: three anti transparent websites, and it gets taken very seriously
Speaker 4: just because the media fan the flames. A lot of
Speaker 4: these groups were very excited to have something that seemed
Speaker 4: to be a case study on their side. The paper
Speaker 4: was heavily critiqued when it came out. There are now
Speaker 4: and I described this in an all nine SI have
Speaker 4: it's free if you google my name, and all the
Speaker 4: evidence against social contagion it's in there. There are now
Speaker 4: ten papers that have tested the idea of rap it
Speaker 4: on at gender dysphoria and or social contagion and found
Speaker 4: evidence that contradicts the hypothesis.
Speaker 1: So it's still being.
Speaker 4: Talked about that Pamela Paul. It was an alped that
Speaker 4: looked like an article in the New York Times. It's
Speaker 4: not the first time Pamela Paul and or the New
Speaker 4: York Times has done this. They've seemed to have a
Speaker 4: particular acts to grind against trans people and putting out
Speaker 4: specious articles suggesting that gender firming care, especially for trans youth,
Speaker 4: is bad, when actually all the evidence points to the opposite.
Speaker 4: So yeah, that's a brief discussion of rapid ons at genders,
Speaker 4: for which I think is the most popular of these
Speaker 4: kind of pseudoscientific ideas, But there are definitely others that
Speaker 4: are like about like four or five others that I
Speaker 4: could get into, and I do get into in the
Speaker 4: Afterword and in some of my other writings.
Speaker 1: But yeah, and.
Speaker 4: You know, I don't use the word pseudoscientific lightly. Basically,
Speaker 4: there's like science, which is where different research groups try
Speaker 4: to answer a particular question and if they all get
Speaker 4: similar answers, then that becomes okay, well, that seems to
Speaker 4: be established. Now let's work from there and ask more
Speaker 4: questions and do more studies. Junk science is when you
Speaker 4: do kind of a crappy study that doesn't really interrogate
Speaker 4: all the possibilities, that either doesn't use controls or you know,
Speaker 4: only looks at you know, a bias sampling size or
Speaker 4: a bias sample or small sample sizes, and comes to
Speaker 4: a conclusion that.
Speaker 1: It wants to come to. That's junk science.
Speaker 4: And then pseudoscience is when multiple independent groups all find
Speaker 4: something different to what you're saying, but you keep touting
Speaker 4: the thing you're saying is science. And that's definitely where
Speaker 4: our gd is right now. Same thing with one of
Speaker 4: these ideas that I talked about way back early and
Speaker 4: Whipping Girl, and I've written other, you know, both academic
Speaker 4: papers and online essays about this concept of autoginophilia, which
Speaker 4: is this really old theory that just like it's kind
Speaker 4: of like this zombie. It doesn't matter how many groups
Speaker 4: find evidence to the contrary. It jibes with what basically
Speaker 4: certain you know, gender disaffirming practitioners, practitioners and researchers and
Speaker 4: anti transactivists. It jobs with what they want to say,
Speaker 4: so it just kind of continues to be out there.
Speaker 3: So yeah, yeah, I mean something that Garrison we were
Speaker 3: talking about before, this is the extent to which the
Speaker 3: extent to which the rapid Onset Gender is for you
Speaker 3: study is almost exactly the same study as the first
Speaker 3: anti vax study like it has it has almost exactly
Speaker 3: the same It's the same thing where you find a
Speaker 3: group of people who think their kid has autism because
Speaker 3: they were got vaccinated, or you find a group of
Speaker 3: people who think their kids are trans because social contagion
Speaker 3: or something, and then you asked them about it, and
Speaker 3: then you report the results of the study and it's like, well,
Speaker 3: now and you report the results of you asking the
Speaker 3: people the thing that they believe, and now it's a study,
Speaker 3: and it's it's I don't know, it drives me insane
Speaker 3: the extent to which he is literally exactly the same thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that was something.
Speaker 4: So I didn't know this until h Bomber guy, who's
Speaker 4: Auber who does really good investigations and video essays, and
Speaker 4: I saw his autism and so this is something that
Speaker 4: you know. I remember, I'm old enough to remember the
Speaker 4: Wakefield paper being in the news, and then you've heard
Speaker 4: lots of people debunking it, and then it's officially retracted
Speaker 4: and basically all you know, the scientific field has settled
Speaker 4: that it's like vaccines do not cause autism. A lot
Speaker 4: of that is just like a coincidence of the time
Speaker 4: that you first start noticing that children maybe autistic is
Speaker 4: like right around the time after they've had vaccinations. But
Speaker 4: but yeah, it wasn't the h Balmber guy video that
Speaker 4: he talks about that the Wakefield study is a study
Speaker 4: of parents, not the children, a study of the parents,
Speaker 4: and the parents already had were already suspicious of the vaccines,
Speaker 4: and so they said Oh, well, it happened right after
Speaker 4: they had these vaccines, just like rapido ont sat genders
Speaker 4: for it happens. Oh, it happened right after. You know,
Speaker 4: one of my child's peer, their cheer peers came out
Speaker 4: as trans.
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, maybe they're connected. Maybe that's why they're
Speaker 1: good friends.
Speaker 4: You know, most of my friends, you know, like when
Speaker 4: I go out and stuff like that, you know, a
Speaker 4: huge chunk of my friends, way higher than the average person,
Speaker 4: are trans people. And it's not because any of us
Speaker 4: infected each other. It's just that you have that thing
Speaker 4: in common. You also, really importantly, when you're part of
Speaker 4: a stigmatized group, being around other people who won't stigmatize
Speaker 4: you often because they're part of that same group, that
Speaker 4: can be really freeing and really supportive.
Speaker 3: So yeah, yeah, Sy, we need to take another AD break,
Speaker 3: but when we come back there will be more. I
Speaker 3: don't know. I'm really kind of blowing the AD pivots
Speaker 3: on this one. I'm very sorry, and we are back,
Speaker 3: so I guess speaking of moral panics.
Speaker 5: Speaking of social contagions.
Speaker 4: Yes, moral panics are always very socially contagious.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's really truly, really truly, they have described their
Speaker 3: own ideology and they've projected it out to everyone else.
Speaker 3: H So, one of the things that you talk about
Speaker 3: both in the Afterword and in sext Up is about
Speaker 3: the relationship between stigma and contagion and how it's this powerful,
Speaker 3: incredibly powerful force for moobilizing moral panics. Can you explain
Speaker 3: sort of how that works?
Speaker 5: Sure?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so, And this was something that when I was
Speaker 4: first working on sex Up, it wasn't kind of my idea.
Speaker 4: I didn't think I was going to write about the
Speaker 4: concept of stigma that much, but it really ended up
Speaker 4: being very central the more kind.
Speaker 1: Of research I did into it.
Speaker 4: And so I think most of us are familiar with
Speaker 4: the idea of stigma in terms of like feeling embarrassment
Speaker 4: or being made to feel lesser than other people because
Speaker 4: of some aspect of your person, right, And there is
Speaker 4: that aspect of it that's often called like felt stigma.
Speaker 4: But then there's the way that other people view stigma, right,
Speaker 4: And so you know, people weren't necessarily stigmatized in that
Speaker 4: way themselves, they might view people who are stigmatized in
Speaker 4: particular ways. And one aspect of stigma that I learned
Speaker 4: a lot of this from psychologists. I think it's Paul Rosen,
Speaker 4: I know the last name is Rosin, and also Carol Nemerov,
Speaker 4: and they both worked together and they had other colleagues
Speaker 4: who worked on this. But a lot of this comes
Speaker 4: from this really unconscious idea of contagion that seems to
Speaker 4: be it's like pan cultural. It's just kind of a
Speaker 4: way that people tend to view the world kind of
Speaker 4: like a lot of people and a lot of cultures
Speaker 4: have essentialist views. Contagion is sort of along those lines.
Speaker 4: It's often described as a type of magical thinking. And
Speaker 4: the idea is if something in your mind has this contagion,
Speaker 4: if you get too close to it or you interact
Speaker 4: with it, it can like permanently corrupt or taint you.
Speaker 4: And so it has this kind of contagious like property
Speaker 4: in people's minds, and so people often view groups who
Speaker 4: are stigmatized, especially groups that are highly stigmatized, as essentially contagious,
Speaker 4: where that stigma that they have could rub off on you.
Speaker 1: If you get to close to them.
Speaker 4: And so this happens like when I was really young,
Speaker 4: the idea of like if you were friends with the
Speaker 4: trans person. A lot of times people or even someone
Speaker 4: who is gay back then people be like, oh, so
Speaker 4: what are you? You must be gay too, right, It's
Speaker 4: almost as if that stigma would then like kind of
Speaker 4: migrate to you. And that's a lot of why stigmatized
Speaker 4: groups face a lot of ostracization in society. And so
Speaker 4: so this idea of contagion has been around. I think
Speaker 4: groups who are lesser stigmatized one of the ways that
Speaker 4: that plays out is they're viewed as less contagious. So,
Speaker 4: you know, when I was really young, the idea of
Speaker 4: if you had a trans person in your life, people
Speaker 4: would really question you. Whereas by the time I came out,
Speaker 4: you could have a trans friend and that would be fine.
Speaker 4: It wouldn't necessarily be contagious, unless, of course, you were
Speaker 4: interested in them, and then that stigma would If you
Speaker 4: were like attracted to them, then there's that stigma. And
Speaker 4: I think that stigma plays a lot into kind of
Speaker 4: dynamics of and I write about this and sex stuff
Speaker 4: that the whole idea of like fetishes and chasers and
Speaker 4: all that. That's basically all the stigma that contagent stuff
Speaker 4: playing out in different ways anyway, So I also think
Speaker 4: that and I write about and sextup I think people
Speaker 4: view sex and stigma as really closely intertwined, such that
Speaker 4: I think people view the average person views heterosexual sex
Speaker 4: as a stigma contamination act, where the males the corrupting
Speaker 4: force and it's the woman who is corrupted by sex,
Speaker 4: which is why you know virgins are pure. But then
Speaker 4: once a woman has sex, she's like, you know, she's
Speaker 4: become contaminated or tainted, and she has a lot of sex,
Speaker 4: then people view her as like ruined, right, So that
Speaker 4: idea is bell in there, and I think this combination
Speaker 4: of viewing sex and stigma is kind of intertwined leads
Speaker 4: to this sexual predator, the sexual predator stereotype that we're
Speaker 4: seeing play out in really strong ways with trans people
Speaker 4: right now. But actually, if you look throughout history, like
Speaker 4: a lot of marginalized groups like deal in different ways
Speaker 4: with the sexual predator trope.
Speaker 5: And so.
Speaker 4: I think this really clearly plays out with the kind
Speaker 4: of what I call the groomer explosion that started in
Speaker 4: twenty twenty two, where you know, people were accusing trans
Speaker 4: people being groomors before then, but it really exploded in
Speaker 4: twenty twenty two. And if you listen to what people
Speaker 4: are saying that they're using the word groomer, which sounds
Speaker 4: like a sexual predator thing, Like there's a real thing
Speaker 4: of grooming children that sexual abusers do, but they're using
Speaker 4: it against trans people in a way that has nothing
Speaker 4: to do with that. But what they're talking about is corrupting,
Speaker 4: you know, so their children who are presumed to be
Speaker 4: sisgender and who often I think this is why a
Speaker 4: lot of these anti trans discourses continue to paint like
Speaker 4: trans children as being girls, right like, because then it
Speaker 4: kind of plays into these feelings of like, you know,
Speaker 4: transgender people are the adult men corrupting young girls. It
Speaker 4: plays into a lot of people's view like messed up,
Speaker 4: messed up heteronormative views of sex and fears of you know,
Speaker 4: sexual abuse, child abuse being a very real thing that
Speaker 4: people greatly misinterpret it so that the people who are
Speaker 4: the usual perpetrators, which are usually you know, by and large,
Speaker 4: straight men who are like adults who are close or
Speaker 4: sometimes even family members of the child in question. But
Speaker 4: like when they say grooming, they just mean corrupting or contaminating.
Speaker 4: And I think that both grooming and social contagion, I
Speaker 4: think both of these basically play off of this stigma
Speaker 4: contamination idea. Right, the kids are pure, but then transgenders
Speaker 4: like a type of coudies that if one kid becomes trans,
Speaker 4: then they spread it to the other kids. And so yeah,
Speaker 4: so I feel like it plays a really big role
Speaker 4: not only moral panics, which amosol. Moral panics are there's
Speaker 4: some kind of corrupting force that is often attacking otherwise
Speaker 4: pure and innocent children. Sometimes it's technology, right, and so
Speaker 4: people will be like, oh, we have to ban you know,
Speaker 4: social media apps, you know, because it's hurting the children.
Speaker 4: Or it could be transgender people who are the things
Speaker 4: we need to ban because they're corrupting the children. But
Speaker 4: I definitely think that both these ideas of stigma and
Speaker 4: contagion play a big role in the way in which
Speaker 4: moral panics, why they resonate with a lot of people,
Speaker 4: even though they don't make any rational sense if you
Speaker 4: just think about them kind of.
Speaker 1: From a very realistic, yeah, practical point of view.
Speaker 3: And we have to go to ads, but we'll be
Speaker 3: back in a second, and we're back.
Speaker 5: This is something that you mentioned briefly in the afterward,
Speaker 5: and that's something that we've reported on, is how a
Speaker 5: lot of this groomer thing that started in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 5: and a whole bunch of this kind of modern wave
Speaker 5: of transphobia is mirroring a lot of the anti gay
Speaker 5: stuff from like the eighties that was pushed forward by
Speaker 5: a lot of like evangelicals meant into just like mainstream
Speaker 5: conservatism and specifically how it functions as this. Yeah, this
Speaker 5: is sort of like moral panic and even social contagion.
Speaker 5: The way homosexuality was treated as this thing and this
Speaker 5: sort of social contingent aspect is so common now. I mean,
Speaker 5: even the way we've already alluded to Musk, even the
Speaker 5: way he mentions like the woke mind virus is exactly
Speaker 5: this thing and as it really is like moral panics
Speaker 5: and stuff. Right, this was kind of predated by the
Speaker 5: critical race theory debacle, which then got you know, turned
Speaker 5: into the groomer thing, and now exactly and now it's
Speaker 5: even changed again. And these moral panics can have like
Speaker 5: devastating results in terms of pushing forward legislation that outlasts
Speaker 5: the actual moral panic. But the actual things themselves are
Speaker 5: very short lived. They don't seem to have very much
Speaker 5: like staying power as as as like cultural moments, they
Speaker 5: move on so quickly, Like no one talks about critical
Speaker 5: race theory anymore. You don't even hear this sort of
Speaker 5: groomer rhetoric as often as you did two years ago,
Speaker 5: and it's being replaced by new versions. And yeah, like
Speaker 5: Mia said, the DEEI thing is the current current thing
Speaker 5: that is wrecking American society if you ask about maybe
Speaker 5: one third of population. But yeah, how do you feel
Speaker 5: about like the life cycle of these morals and how
Speaker 5: they relate to like the social contagion aspect.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, no, And I agree with what you're also
Speaker 4: all the things you're citing that, Like, I think these
Speaker 4: are all different variations of kind of the same idea.
Speaker 4: And I do really appreciate the idea of the woke
Speaker 4: mind virus as being kind of like the perfect like
Speaker 4: the exemplar of this and that you know, people were,
Speaker 4: you know, people were complaining about, you know, stuff being
Speaker 4: woke for a while, and you know it is usually
Speaker 4: it's often coded as something that's woke is like anti racist,
Speaker 4: or you know, is something like it's very much associated,
Speaker 4: you know, infused with like when people complain about wocism,
Speaker 4: a lot of times they're like they're racist or there
Speaker 4: or at the very least. They have fears about kind
Speaker 4: of the corruption of pure whiteness being corrupted by increasing
Speaker 4: you know, people of color and and you know, like
Speaker 4: making game in society. Right, But the woke mind virus,
Speaker 4: because no one could really explain what woke is because
Speaker 4: then it keeps shifting and it refers to trans people
Speaker 4: or critical race theory, et cetera. Yeah, and the woke
Speaker 4: mind virus is like perfect because that's how they think.
Speaker 1: It all works, Like it's just this thing that infects people,
Speaker 1: specially children.
Speaker 4: And the way in which there is a recent thing
Speaker 4: just today, I think it was Ackerman, the billionaire has
Speaker 4: been involved in a lot of this DII stuff, complaining
Speaker 4: about his child being infected in college with Marxism, and
Speaker 4: Elon Musk had similar issues with his trans daughter like
Speaker 4: becoming pro marx or anti capitalists, and so they just
Speaker 4: assume that, like, no, my child was pure, but now
Speaker 4: they're infected. It's like, well, maybe there are other ideas
Speaker 4: out there that are better than your idea. Yeah, and
Speaker 4: maybe that's.
Speaker 3: All it is.
Speaker 4: But yeah, so I think in all of these cases, yes,
Speaker 4: I think that there's this idea of a contagion or corruption.
Speaker 4: Often involving children, and it is. Yeah, a lot of
Speaker 4: the moral panic, a lot of the literature, like the
Speaker 4: social sciences literature, all moral panics. They often describe them
Speaker 4: as fleeting. You know, this one, the anti trans one,
Speaker 4: isn't fleeting enough right now from my perspective. But people
Speaker 4: will tend to kind of move on, like the Satanic
Speaker 4: panic of the eighties, you know, like that was a
Speaker 4: really big deal and then all of a sudden it
Speaker 4: was just gone and no one ever talked about it again.
Speaker 4: I think the difference here is that a lot of
Speaker 4: these moral panics are really tied together with what's happening
Speaker 4: in the country more generally, with anti democratic and authoritative,
Speaker 4: you know, views coming from you know, particularly the right
Speaker 4: wing of the country. You know, like one of the
Speaker 4: to major political parties is really pushing a lot of
Speaker 4: just generally across the board. You know, they're against feminism,
Speaker 4: they're you know, against people of color, against LGBTQ plus people,
Speaker 4: and I think it's all wrapped up into the same thing.
Speaker 4: I think that while individual parts of the moral panic
Speaker 4: may go away, they may talk about critical race theory
Speaker 4: for a bit and then shift to trans people being
Speaker 4: groomers then shift to DEI but I think a lot
Speaker 4: of this is they're all intertwined. And actually, I think
Speaker 4: that's like the last couple of paragraphs of the afterward,
Speaker 4: I talk about that as a potentially good thing, because
Speaker 4: even though it's been a horring time to be a
Speaker 4: trans person, with all the anti trans legislation and all
Speaker 4: the anti trans news stories, all the pushes back on
Speaker 4: gender firm and care, despite all that, I think the
Speaker 4: good thing is that I think there are clear sides here,
Speaker 4: and I think, well, this wasn't true early on in
Speaker 4: the anti trans backlash in the like late twenty tens.
Speaker 4: I think most people realize now that all these things
Speaker 4: are tied together from like kind of you know, the
Speaker 4: right wing perspective in this country is just against all
Speaker 4: these things. You know, they want a white, Christian, straight
Speaker 4: minority of people running everything about this country, and so
Speaker 4: I think the rest of us really need to recognize
Speaker 4: that and work together to defeat that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I think I think that's a pretty
Speaker 3: good place to end on. Do Let's you have anything
Speaker 3: else that you wanted to make sure you get in.
Speaker 4: No, I mean I feel like we touched we covered
Speaker 4: a bunch of the book past, present, and hopefully future
Speaker 4: being better than the present right now.
Speaker 5: Hopefully hopefully hopefully.
Speaker 6: Yes.
Speaker 3: So okay, where can people find a the new additional
Speaker 3: Whipping Girl and be you and your work on the
Speaker 3: internet and or other places?
Speaker 1: Sure? Yeah, so the book should be available.
Speaker 4: So it's available for pre order right now, so you
Speaker 4: can do that through like, you know, online places. I
Speaker 4: often suggest people go to the Seal Press, my publisher,
Speaker 4: because they give lots.
Speaker 1: Of options there.
Speaker 4: But you can also go to your local independent bookstore
Speaker 4: and say, hey, I'd like the pre order this book
Speaker 4: and they will do that for you. So the book
Speaker 4: will be available everywhere and should be in stores starting
Speaker 4: in March. As for me, my website Juliuserando dot com,
Speaker 4: particularly if you go to the writings page there, I
Speaker 4: have like literally links to everything I've written online over
Speaker 4: the years, so it's kind of a clearinghouse of free
Speaker 4: writings of mine. There are also links to my books there,
Speaker 4: and then if you're looking for me on social media,
Speaker 4: I'm at Julius Serrano on most platforms that I'm at.
Speaker 3: I don't know how much stronger I can possibly recommend
Speaker 3: reading Whipping Girl. It had I don't know it had
Speaker 3: an enormous impact on me when I first read it,
Speaker 3: and yeah, it will it will. It will do good
Speaker 3: things for you if you read it too.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and it's all still incredibly relevant. Like I was
Speaker 5: breezing through like fifty pages just to refresh my memory
Speaker 5: this morning, and I'm like, oh wow, so many of
Speaker 5: the like intercommunity trans discourses that are constantly happening have
Speaker 5: already been addressed, like twenty years ago, so many of
Speaker 5: like I all the time I spend trying to write
Speaker 5: about like trans misogyny of like, oh I I forgot,
Speaker 5: this is already like all like written down, Like I
Speaker 5: spent so long writing about the Daily Wire movie and like,
Speaker 5: oh this is hardly all this work has already been done.
Speaker 3: I can just like stop.
Speaker 5: Oh man, Yeah, cannot cannot recommend enough.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you, thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thank you all for the kind words. Yeah, thank
Speaker 4: you for having me, and uh it was great and
Speaker 4: thanks for all you do too.
Speaker 3: Oh, thank you.
Speaker 7: Welcome back to it could happen here, your favorite podcast
Speaker 7: for a daily dose of dystopia. I am once again
Speaker 7: you're a guest host, Molly Conger. Today I'm talking to
Speaker 7: a good friend of mine in one of the brilliant
Speaker 7: minds behind the melting of Charlottesville's Robert E. Lee statue,
Speaker 7: Doctor Julane Schmidt, is going to tell us a little
Speaker 7: bit about the history of the statue, from its planning
Speaker 7: and placement to its current state, melted into ingots in
Speaker 7: an undisclosed location. I'm joined today by doctor Julane Schmidt,
Speaker 7: a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia,
Speaker 7: the director of the Memory Project at the University of
Speaker 7: Virginia's Karsh Institute of Democracy, and a steering committee member
Speaker 7: at the Swords in da Plowshare's project. As both a
Speaker 7: scholar and an activist, doctor Schmidt has been a leading
Speaker 7: voice in the Charlottesville community for racial justice and against
Speaker 7: the Confederate monuments that once stood here. The Swords into
Speaker 7: Plasher's project announced back in October that they had successfully
Speaker 7: dismantled and melted down the bronze statue of Robert E.
Speaker 7: Lee that once loomed over the Market Street Park and
Speaker 7: downtown Charlottesville. Thank you so much for joining me today
Speaker 7: to talk about the past, present, and future of that
Speaker 7: hunk of bronze.
Speaker 6: Thanks for having me Mollie, it's great to great to
Speaker 6: talk with you about this.
Speaker 7: I don't think i've called you Professor Schmidt since two
Speaker 7: thousand and eight, when I took one of your classes.
Speaker 6: It's been a while. It's been a while. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 6: Now we just call each other comrades, you know, because
Speaker 6: we're out there on the streets and in city council
Speaker 6: and you know, doing the things.
Speaker 7: So before we get to the final fate of that
Speaker 7: melted bronze, I want to ground this in the history
Speaker 7: of that particular object. Right, This isn't just any Confederate monument.
Speaker 7: This is the statue that made Charlottesville household name, the
Speaker 7: statue that brought unite the right here, the statue that
Speaker 7: killed someone. It's a statue that had history in that
Speaker 7: park for a century before it came down, and before
Speaker 7: it was removed. You led some really incredible walking tours
Speaker 7: of the downtown parks to try to tell the story
Speaker 7: of the way those statues existed in those spaces for generations,
Speaker 7: why they were there, what they meant, what impact they
Speaker 7: had on the landscape and the people in the community.
Speaker 7: I think I went on about a dozen of those
Speaker 7: walking tours, and I learned something new every single time.
Speaker 7: So can you talk a little bit about the political
Speaker 7: atmosphere in nineteen twenty four when that statue first went up.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well it should, you know, just kind of to
Speaker 6: back up a little bit, like the history of Charlottesville, Virginia.
Speaker 6: At around the time of the Civil War, over half
Speaker 6: of the population of the local population was enslaved in
Speaker 6: Charlottesville and surrounding Albmarle County, and black people were actually
Speaker 6: the majority of the population of Charlottesville until about eighteen
Speaker 6: ninety and then it has been on this steady decline
Speaker 6: you know, since then. So to think about it, if
Speaker 6: you look at the history of reconstruction in charlott Pottsville,
Speaker 6: black people came out and registered to vote and got
Speaker 6: politically organized very quickly in the eighteen sixties already and
Speaker 6: were very influential in electing a black delegate from Charlottesville
Speaker 6: to go to the Constitutional Convention. This is when in
Speaker 6: order to rejoin the Union, all of the former Confederate
Speaker 6: states had to get their state constitutions up to snuff,
Speaker 6: and so Virginia, as did the other former Confederate states,
Speaker 6: you know, had a constitutional convention. In our delegate from
Speaker 6: Charlottesville was James T. S.
Speaker 1: Taylor.
Speaker 6: He was a black man from Charlottesville. He'd been in
Speaker 6: the United States Colored Troops, and he had a coalition
Speaker 6: had coalesced around him of some progressive whites or savvy whites,
Speaker 6: you know that through their lot with him and former
Speaker 6: enslaved people and went and you know, and represented us
Speaker 6: and put you know, Charlottesville in the mix for starting
Speaker 6: a new state constitution in Virginia, for finally getting public schools.
Speaker 6: You know, that's one thing that we can think, you know,
Speaker 6: all those reconstruction governments around the South, you know, forgetting
Speaker 6: us those public schools that we wouldn't have otherwise had
Speaker 6: that we didn't have before.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 6: So I say all that backdrop that if you read
Speaker 6: the historical sources of the time during reconstruction and post
Speaker 6: reconstruction in Charlottesville, the white elites were quite upset with
Speaker 6: the state of affairs that had emerged after the Civil
Speaker 6: War in which formerly enslaved people were in leadership competitian
Speaker 6: political leadership, you know. And so when you look at
Speaker 6: the history of you know, then finally as as the
Speaker 6: new you know, there was a reconstruction era constitution that
Speaker 6: started all those wonderful things such as you know, public schools,
Speaker 6: you know, and voting rights for black men, you know.
Speaker 6: But then as the Neil Confederates or their Confederate sympathizers
Speaker 6: start to get the upper hand again at the end
Speaker 6: of reconstruction, and in Virginia that's you know, more or
Speaker 6: less in the in the eighteen eighties, you know, and
Speaker 6: then there's this steady imposition of Jim Crow, you know,
Speaker 6: that's going into you know, in Richmond they put in
Speaker 6: their giant General Lee statue in eighteen ninety, you know there,
Speaker 6: and then in nineteen oh two there's finally there was
Speaker 6: this final push that pushed black people out of political
Speaker 6: office in Virginia, and in nineteen oh two, a new
Speaker 6: Jim Crow state Constitution was put into effect in nineteen
Speaker 6: oh two. And so you have to when you think
Speaker 6: about all of these statues being installed, we have to
Speaker 6: see it as this it's really resentment politics, you know,
Speaker 6: that's come about. That is if you look at these
Speaker 6: speeches that are delivered at the installation ceremonies of these statues.
Speaker 6: And this is where I'm getting to our General Lee
Speaker 6: statue in Charlottesville specifically with this, you go back and
Speaker 6: look at those at the occasion for the day and
Speaker 6: these these installation ceremonies, they were a time for the
Speaker 6: neo Confederate organizations, the hosting organizations in our case, the
Speaker 6: United Daughters of the Confederacy, the United Confederate Veterans, and
Speaker 6: the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Okay, we're the hosts you
Speaker 6: know for this event. And this is a two or
Speaker 6: three day occasion. So there's like delegations coming in from
Speaker 6: all over the state, you know, and you know there's
Speaker 6: this build up you know, in the days ahead, you know,
Speaker 6: leading up to the installation. This was in May of
Speaker 6: nineteen twenty four, you know, so you see, oh, this
Speaker 6: delegation has arrived from Roanoak and now the governor is
Speaker 6: coming in and now this and now you know, and
Speaker 6: so you know, the town is just a twitter. You
Speaker 6: know that this that they are hosting the statewide reunion
Speaker 6: of the United Confederate Veterans. And there hardly are anymore
Speaker 6: at this time. They're you know, quite elderly at this point.
Speaker 6: So there, you know, there's why this you know, uh celebration,
Speaker 6: and this is also an annual meeting of the Sons
Speaker 6: of Confederate Veterans. And so the fact that little Charlottesville
Speaker 6: is hosting a statewide reunion, you know, of the state
Speaker 6: wide of all the chapters you know, of these neo
Speaker 6: Confederate veterans is a big deal. And then and then
Speaker 6: you know they're doing this, you know, and within this
Speaker 6: context is when the unveiling of this statue is occurring,
Speaker 6: you see. And so it's this, it's this whole build
Speaker 6: up of kind of lost cause nostalgia, which which is occurring.
Speaker 6: And in the speeches at the Lee statue unveiling ceremony,
Speaker 6: it's very instructive to listen to what is being said.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 6: You have, of course, you know, kind of local dignitaries
Speaker 6: and statewide you know dignitaries are there. The the national
Speaker 6: Commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans is there. He
Speaker 6: gives a speech. He was also a clansman, you know.
Speaker 6: You know, so this says something there that you know,
Speaker 6: nineteen twenties Charlottesville, you know, elites were not averse to
Speaker 6: rubbing shoulders with a known klansman, you know, who had
Speaker 6: been invited to give a speech. You know, other invited
Speaker 6: guests one was a minister who was a graduate of
Speaker 6: the University of Virginia, and it was you know, just
Speaker 6: kind of revealing, you know what he said in his
Speaker 6: in his speech, you know, when he was talking about
Speaker 6: he said that that the days of reconstruction were worse
Speaker 6: than war.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 6: You know, so this right exactly, Yeah, does beg the question,
Speaker 6: and that yeah, goes without saying, of course, that this
Speaker 6: is you know, almost exclusively a white audience and you know,
Speaker 6: the white school kids. School has been canceled for the day,
Speaker 6: the university as classes you know, canceled for the day,
Speaker 6: and you know, the businesses are closed. I mean, this
Speaker 6: is just you know, quite the community event that's going on.
Speaker 6: So yeah, so reconstruction was worse than or you know,
Speaker 6: we're celebrating today, you know, the you know, the spirit
Speaker 6: of lead, the regeneration, you know, of our values, and
Speaker 6: you know, there's just a lot of of conversation in
Speaker 6: these in these inaugurations, ceremonies, you know, for the unveiling
Speaker 6: of these statues that harken to rebirth and regeneration and
Speaker 6: and you know, and also you know kind of recalling
Speaker 6: you know, the days of old, you know, and the
Speaker 6: and the values. You know of our veterans, you know
Speaker 6: who are now you know of course in dwindling number,
Speaker 6: you know, these Confederate veterans who are there. And so
Speaker 6: this and as I said, there's been this whole build
Speaker 6: up you know, for days and days, you know, I mean,
Speaker 6: of course for the planning committee, this has been going
Speaker 6: on for weeks and months, you know, the fundraising and
Speaker 6: you know, reserving you know blocks you know at the
Speaker 6: hotels and you know, and all guest houses and all
Speaker 6: this kind of thing, you know, banquet halls, et cetera.
Speaker 6: You know. But it's it's also revealing that this installation
Speaker 6: ceremony for the statue, it is book ended with clan
Speaker 6: activity and uptick in clan activity before and after the
Speaker 6: installation ceremony. And why while we don't have well we
Speaker 6: do know, but you know one one clansman who you know,
Speaker 6: the the Commander Lee, no relation to the General Lee.
Speaker 6: But uh but the president and sons sons of the
Speaker 6: Confederate Veterans, you know. But but to just see all
Speaker 6: of this uptick in lost cause nostalgia and then these
Speaker 6: these acts of intimidation of you know, clan rallies, clan
Speaker 6: posters that were you know, put flyers around town, you know, uh,
Speaker 6: and this sort of thing. It just it they're the
Speaker 6: atmosphere of intimidation. You know that this must have been
Speaker 6: for black residents you know of the time. Uh, you know,
Speaker 6: it just it really gives you pause, you know, just
Speaker 6: just seeing how public space was commandeered, you know by
Speaker 6: these people, these Neil Confederates, you know, to kind of
Speaker 6: relive what they considered, you know, kind of the glory
Speaker 6: days you know, of the nation, you know, and the
Speaker 6: kind of values to which they want to return, you know,
Speaker 6: and this sort of thing. So yeah, so this is
Speaker 6: going on, you know in the nineteen twenties, as you know,
Speaker 6: Charlottesville is you know, locked into Jim Crow by then,
Speaker 6: you know, and we're twenty two years into that Jim
Speaker 6: Crow State Constitution. You know, this is the mail u
Speaker 6: you know, in which in which this is taking place.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 6: Of course, Black people have their own institutions, you know
Speaker 6: that they've founded, namely churches, the Jefferson School, African American
Speaker 6: what's now the African American Heritage Center, but the Jefferson School,
Speaker 6: which was a school for black children, and the founding
Speaker 6: of the High School of a Black High School. So
Speaker 6: this was you know, the the black community had its
Speaker 6: own nodes of organizational strength, you know, and goings on
Speaker 6: that were happening even as you know, there were these
Speaker 6: pressures going on with the consolidation of Jim Crow. Should
Speaker 6: also mention that, you know, at this at around the
Speaker 6: same time in the spring of nineteen twenty four was
Speaker 6: the passage of the Virginia Racial Integrity Act. And this
Speaker 6: was the kind of the codification of the so called
Speaker 6: one Drop Rule, which designated anyone with a perceived ad
Speaker 6: mixture of African American or Native American ancestry to be
Speaker 6: designated as colored, you know, and kind of bifurcating the
Speaker 6: population of Virginia into two categories, white or colored. And
Speaker 6: so this is also occurring, you know, in nineteen twenty four.
Speaker 6: There's a very you know, there's very much of a
Speaker 6: legal you know, kind of strengthening, you know of in
Speaker 6: terms of the tools that are being used to separate
Speaker 6: the races quote unquote you know, and what we're seeing
Speaker 6: then in the parks, you know, in our public spaces
Speaker 6: were you know, kind of designating what we're well not
Speaker 6: public spaces, I mean, they were you know, kind of
Speaker 6: designated you know, almost shrine like you know as white spaces,
Speaker 6: you know, and that this is it's a kind of
Speaker 6: broadcasting of who's in charge, is what's going on?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 7: I think you know today the sons of Confederate Veterans
Speaker 7: very much separate themselves from the clan, right, there were
Speaker 7: a heritage organization. We're not the clan, but you were
Speaker 7: talking about this sort of clan activity leading up to
Speaker 7: the unveiling of the statue, and its actually just looking
Speaker 7: back this morning at some of the archival newspapers from
Speaker 7: that week. And so when the day the statue was placed,
Speaker 7: you know, a few weeks before the unveiling, it was
Speaker 7: still covered, it was shrouded, you know, it's leading up
Speaker 7: to the big day. So that in the front page
Speaker 7: of the Daily Progress the day that the statue was
Speaker 7: put in the park, that little snippet appears in the
Speaker 7: newspaper right next to a headline about cross burning. These
Speaker 7: things are happening on at the same time, right, And
Speaker 7: there was a big clan march through town that week,
Speaker 7: and I think one of the it's easy to forget
Speaker 7: that these historical moments were experienced by people whose words
Speaker 7: that we still have, like people who were living in
Speaker 7: this moment. I think one of one moment in your
Speaker 7: historical tour that really has stuck with me all these
Speaker 7: years is an anecdote about John West, who is for
Speaker 7: the listener as a man who was born into slavery
Speaker 7: and this era was one of the largest black landowners
Speaker 7: in the area, was a successful businessman. And when the
Speaker 7: clan marched by that week, you know, they're wearing their hoods,
Speaker 7: you don't know who they are. It's you know, it's mysterious,
Speaker 7: it's intimidating. But he knew who every single clansman was
Speaker 7: because he was their barber, and he recognized their shoes.
Speaker 7: And that just feels so intimate to me, right that
Speaker 7: he's he's looking at the shoes of these men that
Speaker 7: he knows, and then tomorrow they're going to come in
Speaker 7: for a shaven a haircut and he has to say,
Speaker 7: you know, yes, sir, thank you, sir.
Speaker 6: That's right, that's right. And so if you can just imagine, like,
Speaker 6: you know, and here you know John West. You know,
Speaker 6: so here's one of the most you know, influential Black
Speaker 6: residents of Charlottesville at that time, and he has to
Speaker 6: live Yeah, in this you know that there's this this
Speaker 6: atmosphere of intimidation that you that, yeah, his clients are
Speaker 6: coming in, you know, they're coming in every ten days
Speaker 6: or fourteen days to get a get a trim, get
Speaker 6: a you know, touch up, you know here and there,
Speaker 6: and yeah, and and he knows that these you know
Speaker 6: that that these are you know, the folks who are
Speaker 6: kind of maintaining you know that this this public order,
Speaker 6: you know that is so uh you know that you know,
Speaker 6: you better not step out of line. And so just
Speaker 6: to have one's public space, you know, be demarcated, you know,
Speaker 6: in such a demonstrative way, you know, in a monumental
Speaker 6: you know literally yeah exactly is it really illustrates what's
Speaker 6: going on, you know, and even in you know, relationships
Speaker 6: like that, you know that are so like you know,
Speaker 6: intimate a barber and a client, you know, and knowing
Speaker 6: you know, what your clients are up to, you know,
Speaker 6: and how you better stay in line.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 6: It's scary.
Speaker 7: That's what that statue was here right for almost a century,
Speaker 7: So skipping ahead that century right when the statue finally
Speaker 7: came down in twenty twenty one, so not too long ago, right,
Speaker 7: So the city solicited proposals for what was to be
Speaker 7: done with it. Right, A lot of cities put them
Speaker 7: into storage or moved them to battlefields or museums didn't
Speaker 7: want them. People say, well, why can't it go to
Speaker 7: a music museums didn't want it, right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, So because of my I get pulled in on
Speaker 6: a lot of different statue statue related consultations, let's put
Speaker 6: it that way. And I was on the George Rogers
Speaker 6: Clark Committee at the University of Virginia when the university
Speaker 6: was trying to decide what to do with a very
Speaker 6: hideous I called it the Genocide Trophy. It was a
Speaker 6: statue of the George Rogers Clark, the conqueror of the Northwest.
Speaker 6: It literally said that on the facade, you know. And
Speaker 6: so we were in consultation with native tribes. We were
Speaker 6: contacting the various tribal nations who suffered the onslaught of
Speaker 6: the so called Northwest Campaign. So these tribes that are
Speaker 6: in what is now Illinois and Ohio, et cetera, you know,
Speaker 6: and just asking them, you know, would you like to
Speaker 6: kind of weigh in, you know, on this, and you know,
Speaker 6: really sad, genocide is a real thing some folks who
Speaker 6: are just no longer there, you know, or you know
Speaker 6: were you know, became such a remnant, you know, as
Speaker 6: they were so decimated that you know, they kind of
Speaker 6: you know morphed into you know, other tribes others were
Speaker 6: you know, went on you know, later on to you know,
Speaker 6: to uh, Oklahoma or other places. You know, just dispersal,
Speaker 6: you know, really was you know. You know, so we're
Speaker 6: in this you know, kind of year long process trying
Speaker 6: to figure out what to do with UVa's own statue there,
Speaker 6: you know, also a gift of Paul Goodlow McIntyre, you know,
Speaker 6: the same donor who gave the least statue to the city,
Speaker 6: gave this s. George Rogers Clark statue to the university.
Speaker 6: And so in doing that committee work, we made appointments
Speaker 6: with all the big players, all the you know, and
Speaker 6: here we are, We're from the University of Virginia, you know,
Speaker 6: and we've got this you know, big big monument here,
Speaker 6: you know, the Smithsonian, the you know, and you know
Speaker 6: we talked to not about this one, but in another instance,
Speaker 6: talk to you know, the Civil War Museum's battlefields, you know,
Speaker 6: I mean, we contacted all the responsible you know, the
Speaker 6: folks who are going to curate this in a responsible way,
Speaker 6: you know, because you know that's it is a monumental
Speaker 6: work of art. You know, it has stood here for
Speaker 6: a century. It does have historical value of a sort,
Speaker 6: you know. And I mean and you know, and as
Speaker 6: someone who has you know, teaches history and research's history,
Speaker 6: that's my that's my inclination. My initial inclination is, oh, yeah,
Speaker 6: well we should preserve I mean, that's you know, kind
Speaker 6: of where I go to. But the problem is it's
Speaker 6: a very practical one. This is a material object that
Speaker 6: is taking up space, literal and figurative space in the world.
Speaker 7: It's six six thousand pounds.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, the very materiality of it. It is taking
Speaker 6: up space, and you you have to figure out what
Speaker 6: space is it going to inhabit. This is a very
Speaker 6: practical question. If it's not in your park anymore, where's
Speaker 6: it going to be. We contacted all these museums, you know,
Speaker 6: and in several you know, different consultations I've been a
Speaker 6: part of where we've been trying to get rid of statues.
Speaker 6: Nobody wants them, nobody responsible wants them. And you know,
Speaker 6: and even if they did have an inclination to want
Speaker 6: to just the expense of it. You know, who wants
Speaker 6: to reinforce their floors to put a you know, century old,
Speaker 6: you know, artistically not exemplary, you know, monument in it,
Speaker 6: you know, and then care for I mean, museums have
Speaker 6: very limited budgets. They're nonprofit organizations. Why should they be
Speaker 6: expending all this energy? I love the My my colleague
Speaker 6: Aaron Thompson from John Jay College and Cuney, you know,
Speaker 6: she's an art crime professor, and she said, you know,
Speaker 6: she talked with somebody at the Smithsonian who said something
Speaker 6: to the effect that, you know, we're not America's attic
Speaker 6: for racist art. You know, that's that's not our role.
Speaker 6: It's like, you know, it kind of does throw back
Speaker 6: the responsibility to individual communities too. It's like, you know,
Speaker 6: you have a part to play in this.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 6: And so anyway, yeah, so we tried to do the
Speaker 6: responsible thing. We contacted all the responsible actors out there.
Speaker 6: They don't want them, and so then the question becomes, Okay,
Speaker 6: the city also doesn't want it sitting on its back
Speaker 6: lot for forever in perpetuity. You know, they've got things going,
Speaker 6: you know, they've got equipment there, They've got things that
Speaker 6: you know, this shouldn't be sitting there.
Speaker 2: Where is it going to go?
Speaker 6: Again? This is the material object that exists in the world.
Speaker 6: It is a problem, you know, like what physical space
Speaker 6: is it going to occupy? We're just such brute practicality here,
Speaker 6: and I don't think people quite get what it means
Speaker 6: to deal with this. And the only people who want
Speaker 6: it are the very people who shouldn't have it, you know,
Speaker 6: who want to take this object that's caused us so
Speaker 6: much pain and to make a shrine out of it,
Speaker 6: you know, that would continue to attract bad actors, you know,
Speaker 6: and that it would you know. And I'm a religious
Speaker 6: studies scholar, so when I use I don't use the
Speaker 6: word ran lightly. I know what kinds of activities you know, uh,
Speaker 6: these engender you know, and the sorts of emotions that
Speaker 6: are you know evoked, you know, in the ceremonies around
Speaker 6: you know, objects that are that are held to be sacred.
Speaker 6: You know that that attract you know, kind of devotees,
Speaker 6: you know, and so you really have to think about
Speaker 6: what does it mean to be a responsible ethical actor?
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 6: It's like now we're we're in grown up world now,
Speaker 6: it's like, okay, exactly want you know, it's like there
Speaker 6: is a material object, where are we going to put it?
Speaker 6: It's like have an adjunct car, what do you do
Speaker 6: with it? You just let it sit in your driveway
Speaker 6: and make your neighbors mad at you.
Speaker 7: Right, And these Confederate statues are sort of the the
Speaker 7: the junk cars of the Lost Cause, right, because they're
Speaker 7: not rare, right, like, you know, especially right after Unite
Speaker 7: the Right, a bunch of cities, all of a sudden,
Speaker 7: we're like, we got to get rid of these things.
Speaker 7: And so suddenly the market is flooded with Confederate statues.
Speaker 7: Where are you going to put them?
Speaker 6: That's right at that and that is the question. And
Speaker 6: they are And I've used this this metaphor before, the
Speaker 6: the metaphor of toxic waste. You know, it's not responsible
Speaker 6: to say, oh, we want to get rid of our
Speaker 6: toxic trash here and then ship it down the road
Speaker 6: to the next town and say, okay, well we're done
Speaker 6: with that. That's not responsible to make that next town
Speaker 6: have to deal, you know, or maybe there maybe there
Speaker 6: were some people in that town that wanted it, you know,
Speaker 6: but that's not fair to the other people to have
Speaker 6: to breathe in that air and it brings that water
Speaker 6: that's that's poisoned by this. That's not that's not being responsible,
Speaker 6: you know what I mean. So it really is an
Speaker 6: ethical question, you know, what what space these toxic objects
Speaker 6: are going to inhabit. And so we were unable to
Speaker 6: find any responsible actors who would take this on. And
Speaker 6: so then it kind of it's like, well, I guess
Speaker 6: it's kind of on us. We have to you know,
Speaker 6: like the Smithsonian. It's like, we're not the attic for
Speaker 6: your racist trash.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 6: It's like it's really it's it's on us. It's on
Speaker 6: communities to figure this out, you know. And if there isn't, uh,
Speaker 6: you know, some sort of organization that can responsibly curate this,
Speaker 6: you know, and care for it, then you know, we
Speaker 6: really need to think about it. And in the case
Speaker 6: of this Lee statue, of Charlottesville's Lee statue, you know,
Speaker 6: there are about I think there are about sixteen monuments
Speaker 6: of Lee, like kind of equestrian monuments of this sort,
Speaker 6: you know, in the country. I can say with confidence
Speaker 6: that all of the others are of better quality. In Charlottesville.
Speaker 7: That's it's such an important point, right because this is,
Speaker 7: you know, an important historical piece of art. And that's
Speaker 7: true of some of them. Some of them are legitimate
Speaker 7: pieces of but this one is not.
Speaker 1: No.
Speaker 7: I mean, it was like he was smuggling hams in
Speaker 7: his sleeves.
Speaker 6: Oh well yeah, so yeah, it's it's terrible. It's really
Speaker 6: a case The Lee statue from Charlottesville is really a
Speaker 6: case of too many chefs spoiled the soup. You know,
Speaker 6: they the guy, you know, they the original sculptor, Schradie,
Speaker 6: you know, was commissioned to do this, this this work,
Speaker 6: and he got behind on the commission because he was
Speaker 6: finishing another another work of his, which is generally regarded
Speaker 6: as his magnum opus, which is a monument to General Grant.
Speaker 6: I just love that. It's just sorry you got to
Speaker 6: wait and working on my best piece.
Speaker 7: Ready finished a beautiful statue of Grant.
Speaker 6: And then he died, And then he died. He died,
Speaker 6: and and supposedly it might be apocryphal. I kind of
Speaker 6: like this tale that supposedly when he's on his deathbed TRD,
Speaker 6: he's on his death bending and he's still thinking about
Speaker 6: that unfinished lead. Probably he's like, oh, mind the you know,
Speaker 6: mind the cloth, you know, keep.
Speaker 7: It damp, you know, keeps the plaster wet, right.
Speaker 6: Yes, keep the plaster. He'd made a maquette, he'd made
Speaker 6: a model, play model of the Lee statue for Charlottesville
Speaker 6: for that next commission, the unfinished commission. And he dies
Speaker 6: and so now it's like, well, you know, this is
Speaker 6: a problem, you know, for for the philanthropist and the
Speaker 6: community or the community leaders of Charlesville who wanted this
Speaker 6: Lee statue. So they find they find a ringer, you know,
Speaker 6: this young guy, you know, Leolntelly. Interesting, you know, Italian
Speaker 6: immigrant in the twenties, which is kind of interesting, you
Speaker 6: know when you think about, you know, all the hate
Speaker 6: that was being.
Speaker 7: Whipped before it towns were white, right, that was.
Speaker 6: Before Italians were white. But he was, yeah, kind of
Speaker 6: direct from Italy and from a sculpting background. So maybe
Speaker 6: they made a little exception for him, I don't know. Anyway,
Speaker 6: so this young guy, you know, Leo Lintell, he takes
Speaker 6: over and you know, he probably need a little more practice.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 6: It just didn't turn out well.
Speaker 7: It went to the Lego tail on traveler like a
Speaker 7: chunky No.
Speaker 2: It's just yeah, there was.
Speaker 6: We had a sculptor from around here who himself works
Speaker 6: in bronze and dusk monumental work, and he kind of
Speaker 6: just kind of came and looked at it and he
Speaker 6: was just you know, just everything's out of proportion. The
Speaker 6: gauntlets on the glove are too thick, you know, the
Speaker 6: sword is too long, the tail is too fat, I
Speaker 6: mean in his head. Yeah, that Lee's head on top
Speaker 6: of his shoulders. It just looks like, you know, kind
Speaker 6: of like almost like Transformer toy or something. I mean,
Speaker 6: it's just really weird, you know, proportions. It's just it
Speaker 6: just really was not very well executed because apparently the maquette,
Speaker 6: the model that had been made, just was completely destroyed.
Speaker 6: The model, the original model by Schrady, was completely turned
Speaker 6: to dust, and so Lintelly, the successor sculptor, had to
Speaker 6: work from the drawings that that that remained, you know,
Speaker 6: and you know, it just didn't didn't really go very well.
Speaker 6: And here's the thing that even the Boosters at the time,
Speaker 6: that is, you know, the folks that were planning the
Speaker 6: in for the installation of the leaf statue in the
Speaker 6: nineteen twenties themselves did not think it was very well executed.
Speaker 6: We have diary entries from the Master of Ceremonies of
Speaker 6: the installation ceremony, RTW Duke's and he says, he writes
Speaker 6: in it's like day or two before the installation, he says,
Speaker 6: went on a walk, you know tonight, you know, went
Speaker 6: by the park, you know, saw the Lea statue.
Speaker 7: I do not like it me either.
Speaker 6: This is the guy who's please damn see this unveiling
Speaker 6: ceremony in you know, the next day or two.
Speaker 7: How embarrassing.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and there's op eds even, you know. Also they're
Speaker 6: saying like wow, you know, that just doesn't look good
Speaker 6: at all, you know. So and these are the these
Speaker 6: are the support these are the Neo Confederates, the one
Speaker 6: it there. And they've they've noticed that too many cooks
Speaker 6: spoiled the soup, you know. And then apparently the murmurs
Speaker 6: were sufficient that one of the speakers at the installation ceremony,
Speaker 6: I can harken back to that, you know, at the
Speaker 6: Lee installation ceremony, you know, I guess felt compelled to
Speaker 6: address the complaints that were apparently circulating. And he said,
Speaker 6: you know, I'm talking about the proportionality problem that I
Speaker 6: mentioned before, that just so many it's just very disjointed,
Speaker 6: you know, so many parts of the of the monument
Speaker 6: are out of proportion to other parts. And so this
Speaker 6: speaker at the installation ceremony said, you know, there are
Speaker 6: those who say that the pedestal you know, upon which
Speaker 6: the Lee statue is, you know, is set, is too small,
Speaker 6: But I say the world itself is too small a
Speaker 6: pedestal for general Lee.
Speaker 2: Just like oh yeah, good say it's it's yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 7: I mean the whole thing, the plinth was too small,
Speaker 7: the statue was too large for that tiny park. It
Speaker 7: just it was never a good spot for him.
Speaker 6: It was never a good spot. So anyway, all that
Speaker 6: is to say, it's a very it's a very poor
Speaker 6: work of art, just just an aesthetic.
Speaker 1: I mean.
Speaker 6: And I'm not one that wants to remove, you know,
Speaker 6: kind of any moral considerations from aesthetic. There are some
Speaker 6: people philosophers who want to parse that out and this
Speaker 6: sort of thing. But even if you believe you could
Speaker 6: do that, which I do not, you know, it's just
Speaker 6: really a not It's like having a high school art project.
Speaker 6: A C I give it a c it's a high
Speaker 6: school art project.
Speaker 7: That it's not worth saving, right, No, Like even if
Speaker 7: it had not been this sort of lightning rod in
Speaker 7: our community, right that, even if this were a you know,
Speaker 7: a beautiful piece of art that was worth saving, I
Speaker 7: don't know, I don't know. There's there's two separate concerns, right, Like,
Speaker 7: it's not beautiful enough to put into a museum regardless,
Speaker 7: but then also preserving this object in any capacity just
Speaker 7: allows it to sort of continue to be this lightning rod,
Speaker 7: like you know, for it's sort of asking about, well,
Speaker 7: what's the problem with recontextualization. Why can't you just put
Speaker 7: it somewhere else? And I think that's sort of a
Speaker 7: broader conversation about these statues in general. But for our statue,
Speaker 7: for that Robert E. Lee statue, right that it had
Speaker 7: become sort of a pilgrimage site for vigilanti violence.
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, And I don't know that like just out
Speaker 6: for the listeners in radio land, just for folks out
Speaker 6: there listening that even after the twenty seventeen Unite the
Speaker 6: Right rally, this statue stood for another four years in
Speaker 6: our part while we had to wrestle through legal issues
Speaker 6: legislative and judicial entanglements that prevented Charlottesville from removing that
Speaker 6: statue even after the Unite the Right rally, and during
Speaker 6: that time, that four year interim. It's crazy to think
Speaker 6: about it, Huh. For ye that for four years after
Speaker 6: Unite the Riot, it was still there.
Speaker 7: Like this statue made everyone else realize they needed to
Speaker 7: get rid of theirs. But because of state law and
Speaker 7: these lawsuits, we were still stuck with ours.
Speaker 6: Charlottesville was still stuck with it. And there were and
Speaker 6: these you know, different groups, some of the same constituencies
Speaker 6: that had attended Unite the Right continued to come and
Speaker 6: make their pilgrimages to the Lee statue and to antagonize
Speaker 6: community members by putting up their propaganda near the statues
Speaker 6: and even uh you know, going to the fourth you know,
Speaker 6: the the crash site on Fourth Street where a neo
Speaker 6: Nazi drove his car you know, into a crowd of
Speaker 6: of Charlottesville counter protesters and killed community member Heather Hire.
Speaker 6: These these uh fascists you know, who would make their
Speaker 6: pilgrimage to Charlottesville, would make sure and still do upon occasion,
Speaker 6: uh go to Fourth Street and put up their propaganda there.
Speaker 6: As well as if to kind of further antagonize the
Speaker 6: community out of sight of our trauma, you know, And
Speaker 6: so it was very clear that this statue would just
Speaker 6: wherever it would be, it would continue to be a
Speaker 6: beacon for these people. And so really it was just
Speaker 6: kind of a question of responsibility. Knowing this, knowing that
Speaker 6: no responsible historical or artistic institution has the capacity or
Speaker 6: desire to take it in, what does one do with it?
Speaker 6: And that it's not an exemplary piece of art. There
Speaker 6: are fifteen other monuments that are of better quality of lee.
Speaker 6: We're not going to forget him, you know, if this
Speaker 6: particular specimen goes missing, and the way we see it,
Speaker 6: we're doing the art world a favor because as I've said,
Speaker 6: it was really you know, not a very good, well
Speaker 6: executed piece of art. So, you know, with in considering
Speaker 6: all of that, you know, in seeing in prior removals,
Speaker 6: for instance, the Johnny reb the Courthouse Confederate soldier statue
Speaker 6: was removed, and there was kind of no plan in
Speaker 6: place about where it would go, and so it ended up,
Speaker 6: you know, getting sent to a battlefield that is maintained
Speaker 6: by a group of Confederate leading folks that seemed to
Speaker 6: favor kind of lost cause interpretations of the war. So
Speaker 6: we'd seen that happen already the year before in twenty twenty,
Speaker 6: that when there isn't a plan, it's one thing to
Speaker 6: remove it, but then where does it go? Again, this
Speaker 6: is a physical object that exists in space, in physical space,
Speaker 6: where is this material object going to go? If you
Speaker 6: don't have a plan, then bad things can happen.
Speaker 7: The least resistance the past, the least resistance is just
Speaker 7: if someone says I will pay to move this, and
Speaker 7: the city is paying to store it, then that's an
Speaker 7: easy answer and you can't let that.
Speaker 6: Many take it, right, And so that that went. So
Speaker 6: when the County Aldmarle County removed the Johnny reb statue,
Speaker 6: the Confederate soldier statue from in front of the courthouse,
Speaker 6: and I think that was September of twenty twenty, and
Speaker 6: we saw how quickly that got sent to this battle
Speaker 6: field that is, you know, maintained by these you know,
Speaker 6: kind of lost cause type folks. That's when Andrea Douglas
Speaker 6: and I and Andrea Douglas is the director of the
Speaker 6: Jefferson School African American Heritage Center here in Charlottesville. We said,
Speaker 6: you know, we still do not have the legal authority
Speaker 6: to remove Charlottesville's Lee statue, but we anticipated that that perhaps,
Speaker 6: you know, in the in the coming year, we might
Speaker 6: I said, we need to start making plans now about
Speaker 6: what can have, what where the statue should go after
Speaker 6: its removal, because otherwise, the same thing that happened to
Speaker 6: this Johnny reb to this Confederate Soldier statue just kind
Speaker 6: of getting sent down the road, you know, to whatever
Speaker 6: entity organization that wants it, the same thing's going to happen.
Speaker 6: And we need to have a plan in place in
Speaker 6: order to kind of capture that so that so that
Speaker 6: it doesn't just kind of continue to circulate to do harm.
Speaker 6: So that was our motivation. So we kind of, you know,
Speaker 6: in September of twenty twenty, that's when we really you know,
Speaker 6: put the pedal to the metal on starting the planning
Speaker 6: of this, you know, and we and mind you, we
Speaker 6: did not even get permission until I think it was
Speaker 6: April the first of twenty twenty one, when finally the
Speaker 6: Virginia Supreme Court ruled in favor of the City of
Speaker 6: Charlottesville in our efforts to remove the lea statue.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 6: So this was you know, six seven months before we
Speaker 6: even knew if we if we could do this, but
Speaker 6: we said, let's start making plans. And so we started
Speaker 6: having these kinds of conversations you know, with battlefields, with museums,
Speaker 6: with foundries, you know, just you know, just learning, you know,
Speaker 6: kind of the nuts and bolts, you know, what are
Speaker 6: the possibilities here? And it turns out it's very complicated.
Speaker 7: Right, So, I know there'd been sort of jokes around
Speaker 7: that it was going back over some of the public
Speaker 7: discourse over the years that we've been sort of joking
Speaker 7: as a community for years like why don't we just
Speaker 7: melt it? Why don't we just melt it?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 7: But when did that become a real idea? Like when
Speaker 7: did it? When did that sort of coalesce into something
Speaker 7: that felt possible?
Speaker 6: I think, you know, in September twenty twenty, I think
Speaker 6: when the Johnny reb statue was removed and it went on,
Speaker 6: you know to the Shenandoah Valley Battlefield Foundation, you know,
Speaker 6: and they have this horrible plaque that they're putting up
Speaker 6: that talks about how these men died for Virginia, you know,
Speaker 6: and It's like they died for thirty eight percent of
Speaker 6: Virginian's were enslaved at that time, So how are you
Speaker 6: saying that they died for Virginia. Also, this is from
Speaker 6: Alba Marle County. The majority of people here were enslaved.
Speaker 6: So did how did the people supposedly represented by this
Speaker 6: statue die for Virginia fight for Virginia?
Speaker 3: You know what I mean?
Speaker 6: So we just like that was so disturbing, you know,
Speaker 6: in September of twenty twenty, when that happened, that's that's
Speaker 6: really when I just really started working in Earnest, you know,
Speaker 6: calling foundries.
Speaker 7: So the idea was always melting.
Speaker 6: I mean, it wasn't until then because see this is funny.
Speaker 6: When this whole controversy started in twenty sixteen, when Ziona
Speaker 6: Bryant brought up her petition, you know, to consider removing
Speaker 6: these statues. The position of the activist then was just
Speaker 6: move the statue. Go back and look right at the
Speaker 6: signs and at the T shirts and it says hashtag
Speaker 6: move the statue. We just wanted it move. Just take
Speaker 6: it from the Central Park and put it out in
Speaker 6: McIntyre Park where there's more space. Don't have it downtown.
Speaker 7: I mean that was kind of like that was the edgy,
Speaker 7: you know, and then they should have taken the opportunity
Speaker 7: back then.
Speaker 6: See right, exactly that was the opening bid, and you
Speaker 6: should have took it.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 7: Just these that offers not on the table anymore.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly that that.
Speaker 6: That would have been good. It would be in Martin
Speaker 6: mctre part on the outskirts of town. So and so,
Speaker 6: you know, when the when you know, the city appointed
Speaker 6: this Blue Ribbon Commission on Race Memorials in Public Spaces
Speaker 6: to have a series of public meetings to hear from
Speaker 6: community members what they wanted to have happened with the statues.
Speaker 6: Should they be removed, should you know, what should happen?
Speaker 6: And you know, and this Blue Ribbon Commission, you know,
Speaker 6: hands their final report to city council, you know, and
Speaker 6: then city council takes a vote, you know, Charlottesville City
Speaker 6: Council in February of twenty seventeen, and surprising many people,
Speaker 6: not some of us who were in the know, but
Speaker 6: one of the council members said, yes, I would like
Speaker 6: to propose a resolution to remove the lead, not just
Speaker 6: move it, not just recontextualize it, because that's you know,
Speaker 6: if you go back and read that report, it's actually
Speaker 6: fairly there's a couple of different suggests like well you
Speaker 6: could move it, or you could just do this, and
Speaker 6: you know, and city council woman, you know, Christian Zaka, said,
Speaker 6: I would you know, make a motion to have it
Speaker 6: removed completely, you know. So it's like, whoa, Okay, we're
Speaker 6: you know, we're making steps, you know. So it was
Speaker 6: it was about, you know, it was getting from move
Speaker 6: from move the statue to remove the statue, as in
Speaker 6: take it away, you know, And then it really wasn't
Speaker 6: until after all the strife, you know. I mean, I
Speaker 6: think there were some people all along who's you know,
Speaker 6: would say tongue and she go, oh, we should just
Speaker 6: melt it down, you know, or you know, she'd you know,
Speaker 6: but but the thought it was just so you know,
Speaker 6: talk about there's much talk of overton windows these days.
Speaker 2: You know, but they're just they're just.
Speaker 6: When that was being said, it was always in a
Speaker 6: kind of jocular manner like oh, of course that could
Speaker 6: never be but or we should melt it down. It
Speaker 6: was this kind of offhand right, It wasn't serious because
Speaker 6: how could that ever be, right, I mean that right,
Speaker 6: Really that was behind. But what it takes is somebody
Speaker 6: taking that seriously and like going through the practical steps
Speaker 6: of what would that look like? And so that's what
Speaker 6: I started doing in September twenty twenty. It's like, I
Speaker 6: keep hearing people say that they want it melted down.
Speaker 1: What would that look like?
Speaker 7: What do you like physically do that?
Speaker 6: How would this happen? I'm a humanities person. This was
Speaker 6: breaking my brain learning about alloys and you know, compositions.
Speaker 7: Here it becomes an engineering problem.
Speaker 6: It really did. Yeah, and I did. I consulted with
Speaker 6: you know, metallurgist engineers, you know, folks at various foundries
Speaker 6: you know, to to you know, consulting and say, well,
Speaker 6: you have to do this, you have to you know,
Speaker 6: consider that. I mean so yeah, it was really in
Speaker 6: the fall of twenty twenty when you know, kind of
Speaker 6: in Earnest started having conversations, you know, with with foundrymen
Speaker 6: and with engineers, with folks that work in bronze casting,
Speaker 6: you know. But most of the time people didn't want
Speaker 6: to talk to us. Right when they found out, oh
Speaker 6: you want to do something with this with the staff,
Speaker 6: Oh no, they just you know, they were they didn't
Speaker 6: want to be involved in any controversy, or we would
Speaker 6: get someone who was on board with it, Yes, we're
Speaker 6: going to do it. And then for instance, you know,
Speaker 6: the company got sold and the new owners were like
Speaker 6: want nothing to do with it, you know, or they
Speaker 6: won't call us back anymore, or no, or you know,
Speaker 6: I mean just things just kept coming up. So it
Speaker 6: was hard to find anyone who would just engage in
Speaker 6: a serious way about the questions. And then even when
Speaker 6: you could, it was kind of like, you know, you'd
Speaker 6: get somebody for a little bit, and then it was like,
Speaker 6: you know, like the fisher, It's like the fish would
Speaker 6: swim away, you know, kind of I don't know it
Speaker 6: just you know, So it was it was a lot
Speaker 6: of different conversations with a lot of different people, you know,
Speaker 6: along the way to figure out like what are the
Speaker 6: you know, literal and figurative nuts and bolts of doing this.
Speaker 6: You know, I learned a lot, you know about standard
Speaker 6: width of trailers eight and a half feet did you
Speaker 6: know that?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 6: Eight half feet yep, right right, you know, and you
Speaker 6: know fifty three feet long, and you know, and you know,
Speaker 6: kind of what kind of what's the hauling capacity, what's
Speaker 6: the payload? You know, how do you balance the load?
Speaker 6: You know, what is duneage? I mean you're just like
Speaker 6: all these things, you know that that just the very
Speaker 6: practical steps that one has to take to melt a statue.
Speaker 7: And so it seems like, you know, the conclusion that
Speaker 7: you reached was this object can't keep existing because the
Speaker 7: fact that it does exist will always be a problem.
Speaker 7: So that this is the decision was made that it
Speaker 7: needed to be destroyed. But what was sort of the
Speaker 7: process of thinking through what do we do with it now?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 7: Like, what is this sort of the vision behind not
Speaker 7: just yeah, you know, taking the statue down and putting
Speaker 7: up a different piece of public art, but a different
Speaker 7: piece of p look art that is physically repurposed. Right
Speaker 7: that you've you've remediated this material, right right?
Speaker 6: Yeah, well we we prefer the word transformed, you know,
Speaker 6: to to destroyed or or I mean it is it is,
Speaker 6: you know, definitely, it is you know kind of morphing
Speaker 6: the material is taking the materials, you know, these raw
Speaker 6: materials and you know, transforming them into kind of usable
Speaker 6: you know, kind of ingots, brick sized, you know, pieces
Speaker 6: of bronze. So that they can be made into something new.
Speaker 6: It's not that we hate art. We want art, right.
Speaker 7: You know doctor Douglas's her background is in art, right.
Speaker 6: Yes, doctor Douglas is an art historian, exact. I mean,
Speaker 6: we are the two most unlikely people to be in
Speaker 6: charge of such a project. I mean, I'm a religious
Speaker 6: study scholar. It's like I've spent years of my life,
Speaker 6: you know, studying you know, how people, you know, make
Speaker 6: make sacred values, and specifically how they gather around material
Speaker 6: objects that they regard.
Speaker 7: I don't think that's unlikely at all, right, that this
Speaker 7: was an object of veneration for a very harmful cause.
Speaker 6: I mean I seventeen years, you know, researching a book
Speaker 6: about a very beloved four hundred year old effigy of
Speaker 6: the Virgin Mary in Cuba. You can see my book
Speaker 6: up here. Well, there's a Cuban fly. This right here
Speaker 6: is my book.
Speaker 1: I'm going over too far.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I see the Virgin Mary back there.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Anyway, so I yeah, so that's that's my book
Speaker 6: up here. Yeah, right here, this is my book, Kachita's Streets.
Speaker 6: I mean, if somebody, oh, and you know, and this
Speaker 6: has happened before. There have been folks, you know iconoclass.
Speaker 6: If somebody went and destroyed her image there in that
Speaker 6: shrine in Cuba, I would be obsensed. I would just
Speaker 6: I would be beside myself. I mean it'd be like
Speaker 6: somebody killed you know, a family member. I mean, be
Speaker 6: on the next plane to get you know, you have
Speaker 6: to console people. I mean a four hundred year old
Speaker 6: you know, it would just be terrible. You know, it
Speaker 6: doesn't have all the hate wrapped into it that these
Speaker 6: you know, statues do in this sort of thing. So
Speaker 6: what I'm saying is I understand that people have very
Speaker 6: tender feelings toward these material objects that they have had
Speaker 6: experiences around them that have bound them together. Religiare you
Speaker 6: know the binding that's the original you know root Latin
Speaker 6: root of religion. You know, it is to bind, you know.
Speaker 6: I get that. And so yeah, I'm not a reflexive iconoclast.
Speaker 6: You know, I'm a Catholic. I'm a you know, I'm
Speaker 6: also a you know, participate in these African inspired religious
Speaker 6: practices and stuff that you know that put a lot
Speaker 6: of you know, emphasis upon you know, sacred material objects.
Speaker 6: So I am kind of I mean, it is kind
Speaker 6: of weird that me I would be involved in this,
Speaker 6: and that, you know, and doctor Douglas, you know, but
Speaker 6: it's precisely because we know the power of these things,
Speaker 6: and the we're eyewitnesses to what happened here. You know
Speaker 6: that we know the power of it, and so how
Speaker 6: to be responsible for it, and so to take something
Speaker 6: like that that was so harmful and to be able
Speaker 6: to use its materials to transform them and to make
Speaker 6: something that's meaningful and beautiful and that expresses our community's
Speaker 6: values and that includes people rather than kind of sets
Speaker 6: people apart, you know, or kind of you know, symbolizing
Speaker 6: moments in our history where you know, over half the
Speaker 6: local population was completely debased, you know. To be able
Speaker 6: to take the material that that was part of that
Speaker 6: and transform it into something else, it's just it's just
Speaker 6: seemed like it just has so much potential, you know.
Speaker 6: And and and then the name of the project is
Speaker 6: Swords into Plowshares, which comes from a verse from the
Speaker 6: off at Isaiah that they shall turn their swords into plowshares,
Speaker 6: they shall turn their their spears into pruning hooks. So
Speaker 6: we'll take these implements of destruction and of violence, and
Speaker 6: we will transform them into instruments of of to cultivate
Speaker 6: you know, sustenance you know, uh, you know, you know,
Speaker 6: nutrients you know, for a community. I mean it just
Speaker 6: you know, to just to just really transform it, you know,
Speaker 6: from from something so ugly you know, into something beautiful,
Speaker 6: you know. And we just thought, you know, let's let's
Speaker 6: take the chance. Let's try and do this. Let's do
Speaker 6: something that's never been done before, because none of these
Speaker 6: statues have ever been like I don't think ever completely
Speaker 6: the Confederate ones anyway, have ever been completely destroyed, you know,
Speaker 6: like this. Most of them are just in storage somewhere.
Speaker 6: And we said, let's let's take this chance to transform.
Speaker 6: Let's be responsible first of all, and not send our
Speaker 6: talks waist down the road to another community, and let's
Speaker 6: try to do something transformative, you know, for our community.
Speaker 6: And maybe this can also move the needle, you know,
Speaker 6: in a national and international conversation about art and the
Speaker 6: reparative values you know, potential reparative values of art you know,
Speaker 6: and community building, you know, and so in our you know,
Speaker 6: we're the swords into Plowsher's project. We're hoping to put
Speaker 6: out a request for proposals, you know, to artists this
Speaker 6: year in twenty twenty four, which is the one hundredth
Speaker 6: anniversary of when the Least statue was installed. You know, ideally,
Speaker 6: you know, fingers crossed, if you know, it would be
Speaker 6: wonderful if we could have a completed statue in twenty
Speaker 6: twenty seven, which would be the ten year anniversary of
Speaker 6: the Unite the Right rally, you know, to to you know,
Speaker 6: to have something else to give back to our community.
Speaker 6: You know, that's a blasting value that, you know, and
Speaker 6: for us, it's important that we write our narrative. There
Speaker 6: were people who attacked us, you know, who tried to
Speaker 6: kind of imprint on us, you know, some sort of
Speaker 6: narrative about what we were about. And it also kind
Speaker 6: of you know, reverberated in a you know, national and
Speaker 6: international way. And we're really taking control of the narrative here.
Speaker 6: We're saying, you know, we we are going to say
Speaker 6: who we are and we're going to express that. You know,
Speaker 6: and we do value art, you know, we want it
Speaker 6: to be an art that reflects our values.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 7: I think this is a recognition that art does have power.
Speaker 7: It had the power to harm, It had the power
Speaker 7: to to bring great harm to this community. But it
Speaker 7: was you know, that art was harming people just by
Speaker 7: existing in that space, even before you unite the right.
Speaker 7: And now those same materials have hopefully the power to
Speaker 7: bring some repair. Yeah, So it wasn't it wasn't just
Speaker 7: the practical you know, I think you were saying. It
Speaker 7: started out a sort of a practical question is what
Speaker 7: do you do with this large object? And so the
Speaker 7: practical answer is you reduce its size, you melt it down,
Speaker 7: You remove it, and you melt it down. But it's
Speaker 7: not just practical, right, there is there is incredible symbolic
Speaker 7: value in using that material, that metal, right. I think
Speaker 7: in some of the articles you all talked about as
Speaker 7: it was melting there were impurities in the metal. So
Speaker 7: as this statue is being melted down, the impurities are
Speaker 7: being extracted from it. It's being purified, and now it
Speaker 7: can be repurposed. That's really beautiful, Yeah it is.
Speaker 6: Yeah, the slag getting pulled off the top and just yeah,
Speaker 6: just it was incredible, you know, to see for sure.
Speaker 7: And so at this stage you guys are soliciting community input.
Speaker 7: I think there's a sort of a community survey out
Speaker 7: about sort of what parks people frequent, how they're using
Speaker 7: the parks, how they're engaging with the parks, and you
Speaker 7: said this year there'll be a request for proposals for
Speaker 7: artists to sort of put forth their vision for this bronze, right.
Speaker 6: And this is it's nice because this is all coinciding
Speaker 6: with the city if Charlotteville has for some time wanted
Speaker 6: to do a renovation of of its downtown park. So
Speaker 6: this and this has been a long time coming that
Speaker 6: there are you know, sedated, you know, all of this
Speaker 6: drama with the with the statues, but it's just really
Speaker 6: a nice opportunity to just kind of for the community
Speaker 6: to just kind of take stock. It's like, Okay, we're
Speaker 6: you know, we're whatever, you know, going on seven years
Speaker 6: out from Unite the Right. You know, we're eight years
Speaker 6: out from you know, Zionist initial petition. You know, you
Speaker 6: know this this statue has been you know taken away,
Speaker 6: it has been melted, and it just feels like a
Speaker 6: literal and figurative clearing of the land. You know, it
Speaker 6: just feels like, you know, people have asked, you know
Speaker 6: sometimes it's like oh, there's you know, all that empty
Speaker 6: space at the parks, and I was like, yeah, isn't
Speaker 6: it nice. It's just kind of like I mean to
Speaker 6: just kind of I think it's nice to just have
Speaker 6: just push the pause button for you know, in terms
Speaker 6: of things that are there for several years, and just
Speaker 6: kind of allow our our minds to open, you know,
Speaker 6: just like the the space itself and to just imagine
Speaker 6: what that space can look like. I think it's really
Speaker 6: instructive and I wish more communities could have the opportunity
Speaker 6: to do this. Actually, yes, but you know, for instance,
Speaker 6: taking that survey you know that that community members in
Speaker 6: Charlottesville are doing now about you know, yeah, how do
Speaker 6: you know? Where where do you what parks you go to,
Speaker 6: what activities do you engage in there? What do you
Speaker 6: like you know, what would you like to see more of?
Speaker 1: You know, this sort of thing.
Speaker 6: It's it's great to you know, to consider this. You
Speaker 6: know that this is something that has been you know,
Speaker 6: America's uh uh you know, the United States is uh,
Speaker 6: you know, public parks has you know, been something that
Speaker 6: you know, since the nineteenth century. Is something that's that's
Speaker 6: been a real gem, you know in some of our
Speaker 6: our public spaces, you know, in some of our cities,
Speaker 6: and you know, and this is something to you know,
Speaker 6: to celebrate, and it's it's nice to be able to
Speaker 6: kind of take stock to really, you know, think about
Speaker 6: how public spaces can express our professed values, you know.
Speaker 7: Instead of sort of reacting to hate, like taking a
Speaker 7: moment to envision not our reaction to or you know,
Speaker 7: what we don't want, but think about what we do
Speaker 7: want in that space exactly what would what would serve
Speaker 7: our community? And I think that's sort of where the
Speaker 7: project is now, right, just sort of envisioning a positive
Speaker 7: future rather than trying to remediate a negative past.
Speaker 6: And it's so nice because I felt like we were fighting, fighting,
Speaker 6: fighting for so many years. You know, we're in court,
Speaker 6: or we're protesting, or we're going to lobby at the
Speaker 6: General Assembly or now we're going to city council. I
Speaker 6: mean there was just you know all, you know, so fraught,
Speaker 6: and so now it's just so free to like, oh,
Speaker 6: to be able to imagine, you know, and to be
Speaker 6: thinking forward, yeah, and constructively creatively. That's a great feeling.
Speaker 7: So how can people sort of keep up with sorts
Speaker 7: into plow Shares, stay up to date on the project
Speaker 7: and its progress, and more importantly, how can they support
Speaker 7: sorts into plow Shares.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so you can visit Sipseville dot com. That's s
Speaker 6: I P C v I L l E dot com.
Speaker 6: So sip Cville that's Swords into Plowshires Ceville. And we
Speaker 6: have occasional updates there with news stories about what we're
Speaker 6: doing and upcoming meetings which will be happening at the
Speaker 6: Jefferson School, uh, where we'll be you know, kind of
Speaker 6: presenting results of of you know, surveys that we've done,
Speaker 6: you know, and uh and also visiting speakers who will
Speaker 6: be coming to talk about, you know, what what does
Speaker 6: art mean in public spaces? You know, So we'll be
Speaker 6: able to kind of you know, talk with uh, you know,
Speaker 6: some experts that have come in, you know, to advise
Speaker 6: us on you know, how to think about about what
Speaker 6: we want in our in our in our parks going forward.
Speaker 7: And can people make donations to s I P on
Speaker 7: the website, Yes, on the website, there is a portal
Speaker 7: right there on Sipseyville dot com.
Speaker 6: Definitely welcome that as well.
Speaker 7: And those donations go towards for the the ultimate creation
Speaker 7: of this piece of art. Correct, right, It is not
Speaker 7: cheap to work with that much.
Speaker 2: More it is not.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so we're we're you know, putting together you know,
Speaker 6: fun to pay the artists, you know, for the commissioning
Speaker 6: the artists.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 6: We're also applying for you know, grants from foundations and
Speaker 6: this sort of thing too. But of course there are
Speaker 6: other expenses associated with uh, you know, processing materials and
Speaker 6: yeah and all that.
Speaker 7: So yeah, so that is s I P C V
Speaker 7: I L L E dot com slash donate to make
Speaker 7: sure that that artist gets paid. Absolutely well, Juliane, thank
Speaker 7: you so much for joining us today and looking forward
Speaker 7: to seeing our our new beautiful piece of art, hopefully
Speaker 7: by twenty twenty seven.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, it's great. Well, thank you for your interest, Mollie,
Speaker 6: and thank you to all the listeners and supporters out there.
Speaker 6: Means a lot to us that you know, your interest
Speaker 6: in us and your support appreciate it.
Speaker 7: I think we all love those photos of Lee's melting face.
Speaker 6: It is icon I gotta say, it's iconic, you know.
Speaker 6: I yeah, we'll always have that, have that memory.
Speaker 7: Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: All right, A welcome back to It could Happen Here
Speaker 2: a podcast where the host Robert Evans, one of the
Speaker 2: hosts has recently recovered from a terrible, terrible sickness by
Speaker 2: by engaging in some fascinating experiments with thera flu, largely
Speaker 2: using a friend's diabetic needles, just shooting it straight into
Speaker 2: the veins My co host today, Garrison Davis, have you
Speaker 2: ever ever shot flew medication into your veins?
Speaker 5: Garrison, No, I've only shot one thing into my veins.
Speaker 2: Well, speaking of shooting, today's episode of It Could Happen
Speaker 2: Here is about a shooting. And before you are like,
Speaker 2: oh man, I don't really have it in me to
Speaker 2: listen to a horrible story about people dying today, don't worry.
Speaker 2: Nobody gets shot in this story.
Speaker 5: Thank God, miraculously no one gets shot, Like against.
Speaker 2: All odds, it's stunning that nobody got shot. This is
Speaker 2: the tale of a police officer fucking up, not worse
Speaker 2: than any cop has ever fucked up, because again he
Speaker 2: didn't kill anybody, but fucking up in a way that's
Speaker 2: like more baffling and incompetent than I think I've ever
Speaker 2: seen before. It's probably the most embarrassing and certainly the
Speaker 2: most embarrassing, and not even really malevolent, just like outrageously incompetent,
Speaker 2: but I'm gonna let you take over from here, Garrison.
Speaker 5: So, yeah, we are going to be talking about in
Speaker 5: acorn involved shooting today, happened, that happened in Florida.
Speaker 2: Finally we know what the A and A cab stands for.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 5: So we're gonna we're gonna play some clips here, but
Speaker 5: I think it's important to set the scene so you
Speaker 5: kind of understand what you're hearing. So this cop walks
Speaker 5: up to his patrol car, there is a suspect locked
Speaker 5: in the back.
Speaker 2: Sunny day, Houston suburbs, big houses, wide streets.
Speaker 5: Yeah, now something happens as the cop is about to
Speaker 5: open up the door. He then dives onto the ground,
Speaker 5: does two like action roles, double barrel rolls, and then
Speaker 5: starts shooting at the car and starts yelling to another
Speaker 5: officer who's in the area. And I think we'll just
Speaker 5: we'll just play the rest here.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: The first clips about thirty seconds long, and then I
Speaker 5: just have a few shorter clips kind of that have
Speaker 5: kind of stitched together that just just to get a
Speaker 5: sense of like what he's saying and what he's communicating
Speaker 5: after he opens fire on this patrol vehicle.
Speaker 2: So here is here? Is that audio far Jeff Jukes,
Speaker 2: Burt Chuck's burd.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 8: Oh, I'm that, I'm here.
Speaker 2: What I've done? He has the car?
Speaker 5: Now you shot the car.
Speaker 9: Oh, I'm I'm good. I'm feel weird, but I'm good.
Speaker 9: I might have hit my best. Okay, it might hit
Speaker 9: my best.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 5: I'm not.
Speaker 1: Okay, I don't know.
Speaker 5: I I like it.
Speaker 8: Jess me, I got you remote to me, Jesse, come back, mark.
Speaker 3: You right back, dude, my head.
Speaker 1: Let's get further back, further back to the back.
Speaker 2: All right.
Speaker 5: So that was a lot of gunfire. Again, it is
Speaker 5: shocking that no one died because it's not immediately evident
Speaker 5: if you just watched the video. But there is somebody
Speaker 5: who's trapped in the back of that car, and there's
Speaker 5: multiple officers shooting at the car.
Speaker 2: And here's the thing, the guy. The distance the guy
Speaker 2: is shooting from. God from when I watched the video
Speaker 2: last I would estimate maybe about twenty yards, probably even
Speaker 2: shorter than that, maybe sure, maybe more like fifteen. It's
Speaker 2: medium to maybe medium long range for a handgun. For
Speaker 2: a full size handgun like that, I'd say it's about
Speaker 2: medium range. So a competent shooter should be able to
Speaker 2: hit a target about the size of a human torso
Speaker 2: at that distance with most of the but he is
Speaker 2: not that. When I say competent, that is somebody who
Speaker 2: is bracing themselves and who has two hands on the gun.
Speaker 2: He is shooting like a character in an action movie.
Speaker 2: And I cannot imagine. So a lot of those rounds
Speaker 2: did not even hit the truck. I imagine they went
Speaker 2: flying into a neighborhood where we can hear children playing yes, Yes.
Speaker 3: So the.
Speaker 5: Officer who encountered this acorn, which we will get to
Speaker 5: in a sec was named Deputy Jesse Hernandez. He been
Speaker 5: a cop for almost two years, and we'll learn more
Speaker 5: about his background as we as we continue on with
Speaker 5: this little story. The second officer, well not officer, but
Speaker 5: a sergeant of this Sheriff's department named Beth Roberts, and
Speaker 5: she's been a cop since two thousand and eight, so
Speaker 5: she has a little bit more experience under her belt.
Speaker 5: So let's kind of explain what happened here. So there
Speaker 5: was a series of calls that happened earlier in the
Speaker 5: day about a vehicle who was kind of driving erratically
Speaker 5: around a nearby neighborhood honking its horn kind of just
Speaker 5: like making a lot of sounds at like three am.
Speaker 5: The suspect was described as a black mail in his
Speaker 5: late twenties. And then a few hours later, a separate
Speaker 5: call was made by someone talking about how her boyfriend
Speaker 5: has been refusing to return her vehicle and has been
Speaker 5: sending her threatening text messages. So this caused police to
Speaker 5: go to this girlfriend's house. She showed some of these
Speaker 5: threatening text messages and they were talking with this woman
Speaker 5: when her boyfriend approached the scene. So the suspect approached
Speaker 5: the police in front of his girlfriend's house. Deputy Hernandez
Speaker 5: himself did a pat down to search for weapons and
Speaker 5: observed a more thorough search once the suspect was handcuffed.
Speaker 5: The missing car was located a few miles away, and
Speaker 5: Hernandez was on his way back to the car to
Speaker 5: do a tertiary search of the suspect, who is currently
Speaker 5: locked in the backseat with handcuffs. And then as Deputy
Speaker 5: Hernandez passed the passenger side door in acorn fell onto
Speaker 5: the roof of his car, which is barely barely audible
Speaker 5: in it. The bodycam video that we have access to.
Speaker 2: So you would not notice it were you not listening
Speaker 2: for it.
Speaker 7: No, no, So.
Speaker 5: Three days later, Deputy Hernandez was interviewed by two investigators
Speaker 5: as a part of the Office of Professional Standards investigation
Speaker 5: into this incident of discharge gunfire and this this interview
Speaker 5: in this report is probably one of the most telling
Speaker 5: things about how police psychology operates.
Speaker 2: And wow, okay, so.
Speaker 5: I'm gonna read through a few quotes here from Deputy Hernandez.
Speaker 5: He talks about how, quote, I'm about to reach for
Speaker 5: the door handle and simultaneously I hear to at the
Speaker 5: time what I believe would be a suppressed weapon off
Speaker 5: to the side. I definitely heard this noise about the
Speaker 5: same time I felt an impact on my right side,
Speaker 5: like an upper torso area. I feel the impact. My
Speaker 5: legs just give out. I don't know where I'm hit.
Speaker 2: I think I'm hit. I'm struck. I roll back. I
Speaker 2: rolled to the briving like he's the hard boiled detective
Speaker 2: and a novel.
Speaker 5: I rolled to the back of the car. Now I'm
Speaker 5: stuck in the street, and I knew where the fire,
Speaker 5: where the shots came from, I or I believed where
Speaker 5: they came from. It was right there as I'm reaching
Speaker 5: for that door handle. So I'm laying behind the car.
Speaker 5: I'm yelling shots fire, shots fired, shots fired. I returned
Speaker 5: fire once I could get cover behind another vehicle that
Speaker 5: was parked in the driveway there. So when asked to
Speaker 5: describe what he felt, because he's not just claiming that
Speaker 5: he heard a sound, he's claiming he felt like he
Speaker 5: got hit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he felt an impact. He felt an impact and
Speaker 2: his legs went out from underneath him. Yes, which again
Speaker 2: in the video, he clearly does a double barrel roll.
Speaker 2: He doesn't. That is not I have seen people get
Speaker 2: hit and drop. They did not do double barrel rolls
Speaker 2: like a little action stow.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yea, yeah, yeah, he says, quote, it felt like
Speaker 5: an impact to my upper torso around here, and he
Speaker 5: motions up to his right shoulder on the right side.
Speaker 5: It was like a sound impact, like almost that quick.
Speaker 5: I guess I just loved hit the phrase it was
Speaker 5: like a sound impact.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think he's saying. I think what he's saying
Speaker 2: from reading it is that like we're missing some of
Speaker 2: the body language that he was going to It was
Speaker 2: like sound and then like moving his hands to get
Speaker 2: sound impact, hearing the sound, and then he got impact.
Speaker 2: I think he was actually trying to which is not
Speaker 2: like them, which is actually not in person. Probably very awkward,
Speaker 2: but yeah, it does. It comes across weird and so
Speaker 2: more more funny than sound impact. For again, any corn
Speaker 2: that's falling on a roof, we have quote, my legs
Speaker 2: weren't working the way I wanted them to be working.
Speaker 2: I think I yelled at one point to Sergeant Roberts.
Speaker 2: I think I might have been hitting.
Speaker 5: The leg or something along those lines, because I was
Speaker 5: struggling to get cover. I think at one point I
Speaker 5: reached up to touch my head. I think I still
Speaker 5: had the sound in my head. I wasn't sure if
Speaker 5: I had been hidden the head. I was getting a
Speaker 5: funny tingling around all sides of my body, and I
Speaker 5: think some of that money just been adrenaline. Putting together
Speaker 5: the fact that what I just heard and the impact
Speaker 5: that I felt. I've never been shot before, so I
Speaker 5: don't know what that's like or you know, unquote great
Speaker 5: oh man, So he is. He's unsure if you would
Speaker 5: be able to notice if he got shot in the
Speaker 5: head or not, which is kind of interesting. I mean,
Speaker 5: I'm sure he could get grazed, but like, come on, buddy, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's one thing. It is true that
Speaker 2: like you can be hit like an armor and not
Speaker 2: be sure if you've gotten a hit because it didn't penetrate.
Speaker 2: But you would also not mistake a corn shrapnel hitting
Speaker 2: you reasonably for a bullet Like That's simply not a
Speaker 2: mistake a reasonable person is going to make.
Speaker 5: So the investigator asked him, like if there was any
Speaker 5: other sense that there could have been gunfire, like if
Speaker 5: you saw any like shattered glass coming from the car,
Speaker 5: and Hernandez said no. When asked why he decided to
Speaker 5: stop firing, Hernandez said that he stopped firing once he
Speaker 5: emptied his clip, moved to cover behind it nearby Tesla
Speaker 5: end quote, didn't observe any rounds coming back at me.
Speaker 2: Just just great, because why there's the.
Speaker 5: Hernandez claim that he was never able to see the
Speaker 5: suspect while in the patrol car.
Speaker 2: And Hernandez remained behind.
Speaker 5: Cover till other deputies arrived and was rushed to a hospital,
Speaker 5: where only then he was informed that he did not,
Speaker 5: in fact to get shot.
Speaker 2: It's amazing he made it all the way to a hospital.
Speaker 2: So you had a lot of chances. You had a
Speaker 2: lot of chances to not fuck that up.
Speaker 3: Man.
Speaker 5: As soon as the other cops arrive on the seat,
Speaker 5: he's like, I don't know, I just I just feel
Speaker 5: so weird.
Speaker 2: Yeah, buddy, you you had an adrenaline drop because you panicked,
Speaker 2: Like that is why you feel weird.
Speaker 5: Like a lot always this like mirrors the police fentanel things,
Speaker 5: how they can like talk the themselves into feeling into
Speaker 5: like feeling symptoms.
Speaker 2: Yes, but all right, So.
Speaker 5: Hernandoz hadn't been a cop for very long. He had
Speaker 5: He had no prior law enforcement experience before joining this
Speaker 5: Florida Sheriff's department, but he did attend to West Point
Speaker 5: and served as a Special Forces Infantry officers in the
Speaker 5: Army for ten years. So one could maybe assume that
Speaker 5: the deputy's outrageous behavior was the result of some kind
Speaker 5: of PTSD.
Speaker 2: From serving as Special Forces. But maybe maybe I could
Speaker 2: kind of explain some of what's going on here. I
Speaker 2: had multiple people when I posted this on Twitter, be like, oh,
Speaker 2: this is maybe people with like PTSD shouldn't be.
Speaker 5: Cops, And I had to be like no, no, no, Well,
Speaker 5: see the funny thing about that is that he never
Speaker 5: actually served in combat.
Speaker 2: No, this guy flew a fucking desk, yeah, which like
Speaker 2: you need that in a war. But like this, this
Speaker 2: man did not have any combat trauma that caused him
Speaker 2: to react this way.
Speaker 5: You know, like I I've had I've had PTSD. You know,
Speaker 5: I've certainly gotten like I can get really jumpy with
Speaker 5: certain sounds.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is not that six months Carriod where fireworks
Speaker 2: made us all very unhappy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, or like keys dropping was the big one for
Speaker 5: me because it sounded like a tear guest canister rolling
Speaker 5: on his bottles.
Speaker 2: But you know when in the many times that I
Speaker 2: had bottles fall near me and set me off, or
Speaker 2: that fireworks went off near me and set me off,
Speaker 2: I was often carrying a gun and what I never
Speaker 2: did was empty it vaguely in the direction of a car.
Speaker 2: So he never saw combat.
Speaker 5: He did claim that he was aware of what suppressed
Speaker 5: gunfire sounded like, and he affirmed that the noise he
Speaker 5: herd reminded him of suppressed gunfire.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, bro, what the fuck?
Speaker 5: Under questioning Herd, Eda said that he did not perceive
Speaker 5: any other sounds, visuals, or physical indicators. Of gunfire besides
Speaker 5: the initial tapping sound and his upper torso feeling. In
Speaker 5: the interview, he was asked why he decided to fall
Speaker 5: onto the pavement, and he said, I'm not sure if
Speaker 5: it was adrenaline or just what, but the numbness of
Speaker 5: my legs and realizing, Okay, I'm going to be on
Speaker 5: the ground, but also realizing the windows are right there,
Speaker 5: you know, I'm I need to be on the ground anyway,
Speaker 5: so I'm not exposed. So yeah, and that that just
Speaker 5: kind of led to my legs just kind of gave
Speaker 5: out on me. Fascinating. He then was asked to explain
Speaker 5: the two action roles he performed on the road, and
Speaker 5: her dad replied.
Speaker 2: Uh rnx. At the same time, what was I supposed
Speaker 2: to do? Pretty much?
Speaker 5: He said, uh the rolling kind of reaction to what
Speaker 5: was going on and realizing like, my legs are not
Speaker 5: working the way I need them to work right now,
Speaker 5: but I can roll over to the next vehicle. So
Speaker 5: that's kind of where I was trying to get to
Speaker 5: unquote sure, okay, okay, bro. So after his little action roles,
Speaker 5: this is where he started yelling shots fired and he
Speaker 5: emptied his clip into the car. And told the sergeant
Speaker 5: that shots were coming from this vehicle, and she began
Speaker 5: firing in the vehicle as well. At what point Hernandez
Speaker 5: tried to move off to the side because he was
Speaker 5: concerned about being shot by the other cop. He says,
Speaker 5: when I was done engaging the vehicle, I was trying
Speaker 5: to get off to the side over there because I
Speaker 5: was worried about possibly having possibly me being in her
Speaker 5: line of fire.
Speaker 2: Now sure, this is this is the first reasonable threat
Speaker 2: that he has expressed. I would also be concerned about
Speaker 2: them shooting me in that instance.
Speaker 5: Yes, So, after Hernandez's initial explanation of events, the investigator
Speaker 5: showed him video stills of an acorn coming into frame
Speaker 5: and bouncing off the roof of his car. I'm just
Speaker 5: going to read directly from the from the report, quote,
Speaker 5: Deputy Hernandez asked acorn. Investigator Hogan answered acorn, I'm quote amazing, amazing,
Speaker 5: an amazing sentence.
Speaker 3: This is.
Speaker 2: This is so perfectly how you would like script it
Speaker 2: in a really good police procedural comedy, Like if you
Speaker 2: had some A game writers on the team, and it's
Speaker 2: it's gonna take some really good you'd need like the
Speaker 2: wire quality actors to pull those lines off. Bunk and
Speaker 2: Bunk could have pulled them off right, Like.
Speaker 5: There's two more lines I want I want to get
Speaker 5: to before before we take an out of break here.
Speaker 5: When asked if the sound he heard could have been
Speaker 5: an acorn instead of suppressed gunfire, the deputy answered, quote,
Speaker 5: I'm not gonna say no, because I mean, that's but
Speaker 5: what ten second pause and speaking. What I heard three
Speaker 5: second pause and speaking sounded almost like twelve second pause
Speaker 5: and speaking in credit. But I heard sounded what I
Speaker 5: think would be louder than an acorn hitting the roof
Speaker 5: of the car. But there's obviously an acorn hitting the
Speaker 5: roof of a.
Speaker 2: Car unquote amazing. Uh.
Speaker 5: The investigator then had to ask her, ed, does if
Speaker 5: he was in general familiar with the sound of acorns,
Speaker 5: which must be so embarrassed?
Speaker 2: That is that is that is a low point in
Speaker 2: your career, that is Hernetta said that he was.
Speaker 5: He was then asked if the sound could have been
Speaker 5: what led him to believe the car theft suspect shot him,
Speaker 5: to which the deputy answered, it could be seven second
Speaker 5: pause and speaking, but I don't think so, but it.
Speaker 2: Could be uncorked.
Speaker 5: Great so then Hernandez's lawyer said that they could maybe
Speaker 5: watch the video again and see if see if the
Speaker 5: acorn striking matches the time that he says that he
Speaker 5: heard the sound, And then they deliberated for a little bit,
Speaker 5: and ultimately Hernandez refused to watch the video a s
Speaker 5: second time once he was told it was an acorn's
Speaker 5: I mean, yeah, come on, what's there to do?
Speaker 2: Understandable? No, that's that's that's going to really do some
Speaker 2: damage to your self esteem right there.
Speaker 5: Less than a month later, just a few days before
Speaker 5: a second interview was scheduled, he quit the job.
Speaker 2: So you know what first decision he's made them, I
Speaker 2: mean yeah, like, what what else can you do? At
Speaker 2: this point? This story starts with a bad cop, but
Speaker 2: it ends with a good one.
Speaker 5: Like imagine returning to work and everyone's gonna call you
Speaker 5: like the acorn guy, like you can't, you can't.
Speaker 2: It's just an anytime there's like a there's like a
Speaker 2: fucking acorn tree anywhere near you get like you okay, man, okay,
Speaker 2: do you need to take him?
Speaker 3: Take it?
Speaker 5: Did you call this hit.
Speaker 3: There?
Speaker 2: Watch Out? Watch Out one hundred, one hundred times a
Speaker 2: day guys would be getting on his radio being like
Speaker 2: I just saw an acorn. Dispatch.
Speaker 5: You can get on a possible acorn, uh negative negative,
Speaker 5: that is a pine cone.
Speaker 2: No need for assistance, just some gunfire. We're good, We're good,
Speaker 2: not an acorn repete. We're safe. See is safe? No
Speaker 2: acords insight.
Speaker 5: All right, let's let's take an out of break and
Speaker 5: we will return to hear about Sergeant Robber recollection of events.
Speaker 5: Welcome back to Acorn Cop streaming now on the Discovery Channel.
Speaker 5: Two cops, one acorn. No survive, Actually no, thankfully everyone survived.
Speaker 5: This would be much less funny.
Speaker 2: We would not be laughing about this now. There is
Speaker 2: some permanent psychological damage done to the guy who was
Speaker 2: shot at but not shot and that is unjust and sad,
Speaker 2: yet not enough that we are not willing folks. You
Speaker 2: have a right to laugh at something like this, you know,
Speaker 2: even if there are some consequences to it. That's just
Speaker 2: keeping yourself sane in this world.
Speaker 5: So, Sergeant Roberts was a member of the shaf's department
Speaker 5: for fifteen years. She has a bachelor's degree in criminology
Speaker 5: from the Florida State University.
Speaker 3: So that's cool.
Speaker 5: She's been teaching at the Criminal Justice Standards and Training
Speaker 5: Commission for ten years. So I think one thing that
Speaker 5: led to some of them thinking it could have been
Speaker 5: suppressed gunfire is that in the threatening messages that the
Speaker 5: suspect had shown to or had sent to his girlfriend,
Speaker 5: included was a close up picture of this dark kind
Speaker 5: of gray cylinder pressed up against the center of the
Speaker 5: dash in his car. Less than two inches of the
Speaker 5: cylinder were visible. No parts of a firearm could be seen.
Speaker 5: But they believed that this was a suppressor, and the
Speaker 5: victim said that he owned a suppressor. So I think
Speaker 5: that that is one thing that happened in the interview
Speaker 5: kind of or in the like exchange leading up to
Speaker 5: this incident. But no one got any confirmation that he
Speaker 5: had a gun on him. Again, he was searched two times.
Speaker 5: There was no gun found on him. It is possible
Speaker 5: to like hide a gun on you, It is much
Speaker 5: more difficult to hide a gun with a suppressor like that.
Speaker 5: Is that is a pretty a pretty big object.
Speaker 2: They are larger like it. Basically doubles are more than
Speaker 2: doubles the link of the firearm, and it also does
Speaker 2: so in such a way that makes it difficult to
Speaker 2: carry in a concealed fashion.
Speaker 5: So when Sergeant Roberts was collecting an affidavit about the
Speaker 5: stolen car, she said that she heard quote some type
Speaker 5: of noise and shortly thereafter Jesse, who's Hernandez screaming? Shots fired?
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 5: It was loud enough that it got my attention and
Speaker 5: made me think we're about to have a fight with
Speaker 5: a prisoner or the suspect. Either he's escaped somehow and
Speaker 5: Jesse's in a tussle with him. I can't tell you
Speaker 5: exactly what it was, but it made me look and
Speaker 5: then immediately heard Deputy Hernandez screaming. Shots fired.
Speaker 2: So Sergeant Roberts ran out into the street. Quote.
Speaker 5: I saw that Hernandez was down. He had his gun
Speaker 5: point to the back of his patrol car. I was
Speaker 5: drawing my pistol and my magazine that was in my
Speaker 5: meg pouch. Somehow flew out again. Amazing police work.
Speaker 2: These guys, incredible stuff. That's someone who never practiced.
Speaker 5: Yeah, at which point I thought there was a malfunk.
Speaker 5: I thought that I dropped the magazine. Somehow I hit
Speaker 5: the meg release on my firearm and that that was
Speaker 5: the magazine that fell out. Turns out it wasn't. It
Speaker 5: was the one from my meg pouch. Uh huh, at
Speaker 5: which point I think I fired. So you just have
Speaker 5: magazines flying you freak out and start pulling your trigger.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I will say that last part extremely common experience.
Speaker 2: Police officers are not well trained, and most of them
Speaker 2: in terms of combat stuff, and most of them do
Speaker 2: not shoot regularly. When the FBI's done studies of like
Speaker 2: people who kill police officers, and they nearly always train
Speaker 2: way more often than the police officers they kill trained.
Speaker 2: It's very Most cops are not putting one hundred and
Speaker 2: fifty rounds a month downrange, and like, I fire three
Speaker 2: hundred rounds a month in training, and I'm not particularly good.
Speaker 2: That's what I consider like minimum level of competence. And
Speaker 2: so it is extremely common in police shootings for the
Speaker 2: officer to say I don't know how many I fired,
Speaker 2: or I fired two shots and they fired seventeen. That
Speaker 2: happens fun Oftentimes, even more than that, people will reload
Speaker 2: and not realize that they reloaded and emptied the second
Speaker 2: magazine because in an actual violent situation, and it is
Speaker 2: for that lady, I will say that she just knows
Speaker 2: that her partner is emptying his firearm. Yeah, so for her,
Speaker 2: she's this is less unreasonable, right, It is more complicated
Speaker 2: for Sergeant Roberts. But I think it also points to
Speaker 2: some of the inherent problems with policing. Oh good god.
Speaker 5: Yes, and the way police are trained, Like the how
Speaker 5: quickly it was for her to start firing at a
Speaker 5: suspect who's locked inside of a patrol car, who she
Speaker 5: knows has been searched multiple times, and.
Speaker 2: Who she has not seen shooting.
Speaker 5: Yeah, she she has not seen any gunfire, she's not
Speaker 5: seen any evidence of that, she's heard one man screaming.
Speaker 5: And how quickly they decide to use lethal force is
Speaker 5: I think very notable.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 5: I fired at the vehicle because I saw Deputy Hernandez
Speaker 5: down on the ground and he tells me that shots
Speaker 5: are fired and he's hit, and it scared the hell
Speaker 5: out of me. I thought I was watching him be killed,
Speaker 5: which is Yeah, it's to like how they are trained
Speaker 5: to constantly be in fear for their lives, their fellow officers' lives. Quote,
Speaker 5: it was the patrol car that was where the threat
Speaker 5: was coming from. I'm thinking we've we missed the gun
Speaker 5: in the pack down. Somehow he shot Jesse from the
Speaker 5: car and Jesse's down shots are being fired. I couldn't
Speaker 5: tell you exactly where they were coming from, but I
Speaker 5: fired because of my concern.
Speaker 2: On grit and you get. This is a thing that
Speaker 2: does not get represented in fiction. People don't like to
Speaker 2: talk about it. This happens with soldiers too. I have
Speaker 2: a friend who was shot in the leg by a
Speaker 2: fifty cow by one of our fifty cows one of
Speaker 2: his guy's guns, because they were told anyone from this
Speaker 2: building over that you see on the thermal scope is
Speaker 2: an enemy. They saw him on the thermal scope and
Speaker 2: they lit him up. It was just a series of
Speaker 2: bad calls being made and nobody checking to confirm. Because
Speaker 2: you're in an actual chaotic, dangerous situation, checking to confirm
Speaker 2: is there actually a threat in that area? They're just shooting,
Speaker 2: you know. It's people panic all the time. It's one
Speaker 2: of the problems with sending people with gun into neighborhoods
Speaker 2: like this is part of why the way we do
Speaker 2: policing is such a bad idea, because there's no way
Speaker 2: to train out all of this. You can train out
Speaker 2: acorn guy, maybe maybe, but they didn't. But you cannot
Speaker 2: train out people panicking and doing things with guns that
Speaker 2: can never be taken back.
Speaker 5: Well. And one other aspect is like Hernandez starts firing
Speaker 5: his gun very shortly after he's yelling shots fired. Like
Speaker 5: getting that linear cause of events can be tricky because
Speaker 5: like you are hearing gunfire at the same time you
Speaker 5: were hearing him yell shots fired because he is shooting.
Speaker 5: And Roberts said that she wasn't sure if she or
Speaker 5: Hernandez even shot first, Like all of your memory in
Speaker 5: these instances can get really kind of blurry, like like
Speaker 5: all of these like high stress scenarios, it actually can
Speaker 5: be hard to remember the exact manner of oh, yes, easily, yes,
Speaker 5: she said quote I'm seeing him on the ground yelling
Speaker 5: shots fired.
Speaker 2: I'm hit. I'm hit.
Speaker 5: I thought I thought I saw a deputy get murdered.
Speaker 5: I was close enough to see his facial expression that
Speaker 5: was fear, anxiety, it was it was horrible. I'm seeing
Speaker 5: him kind of trip fall, stumble something behind the vehicle.
Speaker 5: At some point he's able to kind of post up,
Speaker 5: but he was stumbling, crawling on the ground. I don't
Speaker 5: know how to explain it. He wasn't standing up straight,
Speaker 5: he was not in a tactical position. He was off
Speaker 5: as momentum, he was off balance, he was standing behind
Speaker 5: that car. It did not look like he was in
Speaker 5: control of himself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, yeah, that's like what she is saying. I'm
Speaker 2: not going to say this is like a good response,
Speaker 2: But it makes sense to me that she reacted the
Speaker 2: way she'd most people would write, which is why most
Speaker 2: people should not be given firearms and legal immunity to
Speaker 2: do whatever with them, right, But most people would have
Speaker 2: reacted in a why broadly similar manner without training, you know,
Speaker 2: without training and experience.
Speaker 5: Now, there's one way that she describes his kind of
Speaker 5: like weird stumbling on the ground quote. The auditory tone
Speaker 5: in his voice was terror. The best way to describe
Speaker 5: it was like watching a baby to raft trying to
Speaker 5: walk for the first time, trying to.
Speaker 2: Get the out of the road. That is that is
Speaker 2: going to echo in his mind until the day he dies.
Speaker 2: So maybe dressed stumbling learning to walk for the first time.
Speaker 2: Do you know what else is learning to walk? I
Speaker 2: don't know.
Speaker 5: That doesn't really now, do you know what else could
Speaker 5: perceive acorns as a threat to business.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, we I mean, the one thing all of
Speaker 2: our sponsors agree on is that acorns and all trees
Speaker 2: should be eliminated in the interest of better profit margins.
Speaker 2: So dangerous kill the natural world, live free. I want
Speaker 2: to know one other thing as I'm talking about, like
Speaker 2: why they I'm not surprised they reacted this way, and
Speaker 2: what it says to me about like how I think.
Speaker 2: Like I think that a group of moderately competent civilians
Speaker 2: with concealed firearms would have responded better than both officers
Speaker 2: in this situation. Large not for the reason that they're
Speaker 2: more smarter or better trained, because they probably aren't, but
Speaker 2: because they go through the world carrying a gun knowing
Speaker 2: that if anything they do with that gun, they're legally
Speaker 2: accountable for every shot fired they're accountable for, which is
Speaker 2: a different mind state than what police are trained to do,
Speaker 2: which is the instant you feel endangered, you should draw
Speaker 2: and be prepared to shoot or shoot immediately, because nothing
Speaker 2: matters more than you getting home, and you have qualified
Speaker 2: immunity on your side, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, which allows you to interpret a very quiet tapping
Speaker 5: sound as a lethal threat to your life. Now, Sergeant
Speaker 5: Roberts said, that she did observe Hernandez move himself into
Speaker 5: kind of a kneeling shooting stance on his left knee
Speaker 5: with his right foot planted in front, but still quote,
Speaker 5: it seemed like his motor functions were not off running
Speaker 5: properly from what I saw. He told me again, shots
Speaker 5: her fire. He's completely out in the open. No one
Speaker 5: would think that's a good place to take a knee
Speaker 5: to tactically fire. So he was still trying to respond
Speaker 5: in some way, but still very very baby draft coated.
Speaker 2: It seems yeah, yeah, I mean, that seems like a
Speaker 2: constant thing for this fella.
Speaker 7: So.
Speaker 5: Roberts also admitted that she did not ever see the suspect.
Speaker 5: She could not see inside the patrol car and she
Speaker 5: couldn't hear anything coming from that area. Quote, if there
Speaker 5: would have been something going on in that vehicle, I
Speaker 5: don't know if I necessarily would have heard it. Was
Speaker 5: I hearing or seeing the windows be blasted out. No,
Speaker 5: I couldn't see the right side of the vehicle. But
Speaker 5: based on the circumstances, I'm thinking that somehow he shot
Speaker 5: Jesse from the back and it had struck him some
Speaker 5: way somehow. I don't know if the individual's gotten out
Speaker 5: of the car and it's on the other side, you know,
Speaker 5: like he's escaped somehow. I couldn't see if the door
Speaker 5: was wide open. I don't know if he's gotten out
Speaker 5: and they've had a little tussle. Is he's shooting from
Speaker 5: the back of the car. All these things are going
Speaker 5: through my head, but the main thing is that he's
Speaker 5: in the back of the car. He's got a gun,
Speaker 5: and we missed it, and somehow he shot Deputy her.
Speaker 5: Now so she also couldn't remember who shot first, but
Speaker 5: she denied the notion that she started shooting because she
Speaker 5: thought Hernandez fired his gun first. She was confident in
Speaker 5: her her own use of gunfire before before she could
Speaker 5: tell that Jesse was firing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, interesting quote.
Speaker 5: The threat was someone had shot him. We had an
Speaker 5: armed suspect in the back of the vehicle. Jesse was shot.
Speaker 5: I'm watching him, you know, fumble on the road. How
Speaker 5: do I give him more time? How do I draw
Speaker 5: the attention to me? How do I save him? I
Speaker 5: thought I was watching him get murdered. The tone in
Speaker 5: his voice, look on his face, the physical reactions. I'm
Speaker 5: thinking we missed the gun and this is it. How
Speaker 5: do I get to Jesse to save him. She she
Speaker 5: talks about how she quote couldn't let him be shot
Speaker 5: again again, as all of this is like so confident
Speaker 5: that that that this has happened, and they're so confident
Speaker 5: in their own use of force. She was also concerned
Speaker 5: that if the suspect got away, other people's lives could
Speaker 5: be in danger, like his girlfriend who was nearby and
Speaker 5: the friend who was talking to police about their domestic issue. Quote,
Speaker 5: there was a threat in the back of the patrol car.
Speaker 5: I had a deputy that was on the ground that
Speaker 5: was still a threat to Jesse's life. I needed to
Speaker 5: provide him some sort of cover or bring the attention
Speaker 5: to me. I'm watching him die. I've got to do something.
Speaker 5: I've got to do something. There's that just like overall
Speaker 5: constantly throughout this interview with the Professional Standards Investigation, she's
Speaker 5: just constantly saying how she thought that this man was
Speaker 5: gonna die. That's why she responded the way she did.
Speaker 5: Like she talks about how she can't render aid if
Speaker 5: there's still a threat, she has to like get regain
Speaker 5: control the situation.
Speaker 2: All of those are reasonable things to say, Yeah, all
Speaker 2: of those are reasonable things to say in a real
Speaker 2: gun fight.
Speaker 5: Yes, it's just a little bit less less valid with
Speaker 5: the en shiting incident. Is an acorn falling on a roof? Yes,
Speaker 5: and you're shooting directly at a man who's your own
Speaker 5: big car been searched two times and is wrapped inside,
Speaker 5: who has handcuffs on.
Speaker 1: Like.
Speaker 5: So, Yeah, After both cops spared off this large valley
Speaker 5: of bullets, they both repositioned behind cover, called in more backup,
Speaker 5: and Roberts tended to manage the situation and the other
Speaker 5: individuals in the area and eventually check in on Deputy Hernandez. Quote,
Speaker 5: the threat was still a threat until we were able
Speaker 5: to remove him from the car. Again, they're not viewing
Speaker 5: him as a person, They're viewing him as a threat.
Speaker 5: Like that is that is like he's no longer like
Speaker 5: a human being.
Speaker 2: He is he is a threat. That is what he represents.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, and that is that is how they're trained
Speaker 2: to talk. And that is, by the way, like in
Speaker 2: a court of law, how you should talk, right, you don't.
Speaker 2: You would not say, if you were involved in the
Speaker 2: legal defensive shooting, I shot to kill. You would say
Speaker 2: I shot to stop the threat. That is like how
Speaker 2: people are trained, because that's what plays best in the court.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: No, she all of her interview is very polished. She is,
Speaker 5: she likes very she's she's been a caught for fifteen years,
Speaker 5: like she is. She knows what she's saying here.
Speaker 2: Yes, she's been coached before. Yeah, she's she's aware.
Speaker 5: So after they were able to get to cover, she
Speaker 5: called in more resources. Quote, that's when we were able
Speaker 5: to treat it as more of a barricaded armed suspect situation.
Speaker 5: This poor dude, Yeah, like what do you do?
Speaker 2: Like you're hanging in the back of the car like everywhere,
Speaker 2: like like it seems like this guy is guilty of
Speaker 2: having a little bit of having an emotional breakdown with
Speaker 2: his partner and doing things he should not have done,
Speaker 2: none of which the penalty for is getting shot at
Speaker 2: while strapped into a car.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he stole his girlfriend's car, He sent her threatening messages.
Speaker 5: He was described as being abassive in the past. Yeah,
Speaker 5: there's bad things, but that doesn't mean you can get
Speaker 5: executed by police because they hurt an a chord Like, No,
Speaker 5: that is.
Speaker 2: Not that is not what our society has deemed the
Speaker 2: punishment for those options for those behaviors should be so.
Speaker 5: Roberts closed this interview by saying, quote, I don't think
Speaker 5: there's anything funny about it. It just went from zero
Speaker 5: to one hundred within the drop of a hat. I
Speaker 5: know we talk about it all the time, but when
Speaker 5: it does, it does. And she's talking about how, like
Speaker 5: how fast the situation escalates, like from a very standard
Speaker 5: interaction towards you're now multiple people are shooting, like this
Speaker 5: is it happens so quickly. It went from the zeer
Speaker 5: to one hundred within the drop of the hat.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's that is what happens with shootings.
Speaker 5: She knew that Hernandez was prior military and when in
Speaker 5: training Hernandez was training on her shift, she described him
Speaker 5: as quote a very squared away person, somebody that if
Speaker 5: they tell you something, you don't question it. I wanted
Speaker 5: Jesse on my shift. When I observed him in high
Speaker 5: stressful situations, he reacted appropriately. He wasn't afraid to respond
Speaker 5: and he's I think that last part is certainly true.
Speaker 5: He was not afraid to respond well.
Speaker 2: And this is why, again, when the response for a
Speaker 2: lot of people when I would talk about this to
Speaker 2: them is suspecting it had something to do with his
Speaker 2: military training that he responded this way. Soldiers aren't trained
Speaker 2: this way. Again, this is soldiers contrained in the field.
Speaker 2: But soldiers are generally trained to not air on the
Speaker 2: side of opening fire blindly because war crimes are a
Speaker 2: thing they're concerned about and they have a sense of
Speaker 2: professional pride against Again, not to say that they do
Speaker 2: not kill innocent people. They do all the time, because
Speaker 2: that's what war is. But this is not the way.
Speaker 2: So this is police training. This guy's bias towards reacting
Speaker 2: this way is the result of police training, not special
Speaker 2: forces training.
Speaker 5: She kind of reaffirmed her trust in Hernandez as a
Speaker 5: person who was like reliable, saying when they were on
Speaker 5: night shift during training, quote, he acted appropriately, He did
Speaker 5: not lose control of his emotions. I have a lot
Speaker 5: of respect for him. Actually, when he tells you something,
Speaker 5: it's not something like are you sure you know he'd
Speaker 5: tell you something and that's what's happening, or that's what happened.
Speaker 5: I don't think there's anything malicious about what he did.
Speaker 2: I'm not mad at him.
Speaker 5: I'm not upset about it because I truly believe that
Speaker 5: he thought that's what was happening, unquote, which is again,
Speaker 5: it just I'd be pissed you almost, Like I don't
Speaker 5: know if I was tricked into almost killing someone.
Speaker 2: I don't understand this reaction. Like it's this thin blue
Speaker 2: line shit, right, Yeah, they have to group together so
Speaker 2: so hard. Yeah, it's it's and it's like this guy
Speaker 2: got you into a situation where you could have shot
Speaker 2: a child, Like I would never forgive someone who put
Speaker 2: me in that position for no good reason, right, Like,
Speaker 2: it's why that's such such an insane response to me.
Speaker 5: So she has to keep affirming that he has like
Speaker 5: a good judgment, and it's it's so bizarre.
Speaker 2: No, he doesn't, like he very clearly doesn't. You'll watch
Speaker 2: the video. It'd be one thing if like they were
Speaker 2: under fire and he shot and his bullet went wide
Speaker 2: and hit a civilian and it's no, that's like absolutely,
Speaker 2: it's just a horrible accident. But like his judgment wasn't bad.
Speaker 2: It was just a terrible situation. This is so different,
Speaker 2: like and that she's still going to bat for him,
Speaker 2: says everything about cop cops, cop brain.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's a few lines that I want to read
Speaker 5: before we close. Out here that are in the conclusion
Speaker 5: of the of the report can't wait. They describe her
Speaker 5: and his legs as quote, stopped working correctly. I think
Speaker 5: it's just a really funny way to phrase it.
Speaker 2: I would describe his brain that way.
Speaker 5: But yeah, his legs weren't responding as he intended. But
Speaker 5: there was no evidence to support anything impacted Deputy Hernandez.
Speaker 5: No defects are found on his uniform or his blistering
Speaker 5: vests support the impact Hernandez. It's response was not objectively reasonable,
Speaker 5: so they they ruled that Hernandez's response was not objectively reasonable,
Speaker 5: that it was not appropriate.
Speaker 2: Positively surprised about that, but they.
Speaker 5: Found Sergeant Roberts's response as being reasonable because she believed
Speaker 5: Hernandez has been shot because of his tone of voice,
Speaker 5: his stumbling, attempts to move and stand up, and it's
Speaker 5: apparent quote lack of control over his body.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would not call it. I wouldn't say her
Speaker 2: response is reasonable. I would say her response is what
Speaker 2: I would expect most people to do.
Speaker 5: No, or it is reasonable in terms of how police
Speaker 5: procedure operates, like she followed the correct protocols for interacting
Speaker 5: as a police officer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't believe under the laws she would have
Speaker 2: been found liable by any court.
Speaker 5: No, they said, quote Robert's found out Hernandez to be
Speaker 5: a reliable depity that she could trust. She had no
Speaker 5: reason to doubt what Hernandez had been telling her. She
Speaker 5: described the auditory tone of Hernandez's voice as terror, the
Speaker 5: look on his face as being quote consistent with being
Speaker 5: in feary. I love that kind of cop speak, consistent
Speaker 5: with being in fear.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he looked scared. Yeah, amazing. I I do want
Speaker 2: to go over one thing before we come out, because
Speaker 2: this is again something I've been asked by people, and
Speaker 2: you know, maybe this is actionable. If you ever found
Speaker 2: yourself handcuffed in the back of a police car and
Speaker 2: they start shooting at you, you should know how this
Speaker 2: guy survived because reading the interview with him, he was like,
Speaker 2: as soon as I realized they were shooting at me,
Speaker 2: I like flung myself down sideways and laid flat. I
Speaker 2: think in front of the seat. He might have been
Speaker 2: on the seat. I would get in front of the
Speaker 2: seat if you can. But the reason he survived is
Speaker 2: that handguns number one, police carry hollow points in their handguns.
Speaker 2: Which is a bullet that has a hole in the
Speaker 2: slug the thing that goes into somebody. And the reason
Speaker 2: why you make a hollow point is that a hollow
Speaker 2: point expands immediately upon impact, so it doesn't penetrate as well.
Speaker 2: It will not go through armor, and it will not
Speaker 2: go through objects very well. But when it hits meat,
Speaker 2: it expands and so instead of going through a body,
Speaker 2: it stops and it imparts all of the force from
Speaker 2: the bullet into that body, so it is better at
Speaker 2: stopping people. But what that means is when someone is
Speaker 2: shooting at something like a car and shooting into the
Speaker 2: back of a car and you have that whole reinforced
Speaker 2: trunk and backseat of a police car to go through
Speaker 2: those nine millimeters, rounds are unlikely to penetrate very far.
Speaker 2: So if you are laying down in front of the
Speaker 2: seat or flat on the seat, your odds of not
Speaker 2: getting hit are pretty good. Like he had, I'm not
Speaker 2: surprised he survived having done what he did. You know,
Speaker 2: if you're sitting up and you've got body parts that
Speaker 2: are like view of the windows, you're very likely to
Speaker 2: get hit. But because he did what he did, he
Speaker 2: essentially saved his own life, is what it's my interpretation
Speaker 2: of what I've read.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, I mean it's it's it is a terrifying
Speaker 5: scenario that there was. There was an instant recently of
Speaker 5: this officer who made his first ever arrest. He had
Speaker 5: two suspects locked in the back and he got distracted
Speaker 5: about driving. He drove his car off the road into
Speaker 5: a lake, and both of.
Speaker 2: The suspects drowned. Jesus fucking Christ.
Speaker 5: Like this is this is like all these things point
Speaker 5: towards just inherent problems with the policing system.
Speaker 2: Cops bad, avoid at all costs.
Speaker 5: It's terrifying, Like it's it is like these people can
Speaker 5: just act like this can kidnap, people can do all
Speaker 5: these things and face basically no repercussions at least turn
Speaker 5: ind as is no longer a cop, which is good,
Speaker 5: but like that doesn't fix any of the underlying problems
Speaker 5: with training that cause people to react like this in
Speaker 5: the face of a squirrel armed with an AI corn
Speaker 5: being the most dangerous thing that you can encounter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's very bad police work. Avoid cops.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, pretty much pretty much. So, Yeah, that is
Speaker 5: that is what we have to say on the acorn
Speaker 5: involved shooting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, great stuff.
Speaker 5: Watch out for acorns, Watch out for droops. Also dangerous.
Speaker 5: They can fall off a tree. Yeah, pine cones can
Speaker 5: sometimes be lethal.
Speaker 2: Oh they call those the widow makers.
Speaker 5: Eyes on the sky, folks, You never know.
Speaker 2: All right, bye, Hey, We'll be back Monday with more
Speaker 2: episodes every week from now until the heat death of
Speaker 2: the Universe.
Speaker 7: It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 1: cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 7: You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
Speaker 7: monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.