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: Hello, everybody, Welcome to It could happen here. This is
Speaker 3: Sharene and today is a very special day. It is
Speaker 3: the first of April, April Fool's Day. Someone may or
Speaker 3: may not have been born on this day. But little
Speaker 3: known fact that I didn't know about until I was
Speaker 3: an adult was that the first of April is historically
Speaker 3: Syrian New Year. That's right. I learned about this as
Speaker 3: a Syrian in my mid twenties, so it's not exactly
Speaker 3: very well known, but when I learned about it, I
Speaker 3: got obsessed with it. So I'm going to talk about
Speaker 3: that and just the history of April Fool's Day and
Speaker 3: how it became April Fool's Day, in particular because originally,
Speaker 3: as I said, it started as the Syrian New Year,
Speaker 3: and many researchers consider it the oldest recorded holiday in
Speaker 3: the history of the Near East. The Syrian calendar is
Speaker 3: also considered one of the last remaining ancient calendars that
Speaker 3: is still celebrated. Up until now, he had uns no relation,
Speaker 3: but he's a doctor in archaeology in Ancient Languages at
Speaker 3: the University of Damascus. He said that the celebrations of
Speaker 3: the New year coincided with the celebrations of the arrival
Speaker 3: of spring, and they began the day of the vernal equinox,
Speaker 3: and they continued until the first of April, a Syrian
Speaker 3: New Year's day. This day is associated with the celebration
Speaker 3: of the end of the reigning season and the start
Speaker 3: of fertility and the growth of crops and fruits, as
Speaker 3: the celebrations were accompanied with religious rituals in which offerings
Speaker 3: were made. Unis also noted that the Syrian calendar is
Speaker 3: related to Ishtad, who is the first mother goddess, the
Speaker 3: goddess of life, the morning and evening star. At the
Speaker 3: same time, the ancient texts describe Ashtar as in her
Speaker 3: mouth lies the secrets of life. The word astar comes
Speaker 3: from the Akkadian language. She is known as Anana or
Speaker 3: Nana in Sumerian. And she was the first deity for
Speaker 3: which we have written evidence of, as well as the
Speaker 3: world's first goddess of love and war. And she had
Speaker 3: a lover named Tammuz in ancient Mesopotamia, which roughly corresponds
Speaker 3: to modern Iraq parts of Iran, Syria, Kuwait, and Turkey.
Speaker 3: Love was a powerful force capable of upending earthly order
Speaker 3: and producing sharp changes in status and Ashtar definitely deserves
Speaker 3: an episode all for herself. She's completely fascinating and needs
Speaker 3: more than just a blurb. But I had to at
Speaker 3: least mention her, and maybe one day I'll do an
Speaker 3: episode about her. But that's a Shtar for you for now.
Speaker 3: There are other researchers, though, that have criticized the validity
Speaker 3: of April first as the Syrian New Year. Because of this,
Speaker 3: the origin of the Syrian New Year's a key to
Speaker 3: celebration aki Tu. It has sparked some controversy, with debates
Speaker 3: fueled by history and religion. The validity of the ritual
Speaker 3: is disputed because it is not widely celebrated locally and
Speaker 3: its relevance is not generally accepted by academia. Some would
Speaker 3: argue that the celebration of Syrian New Year is useless.
Speaker 3: Among them is Bashar Khalif, who is a history researcher
Speaker 3: specializing in the Mashrich Calif says the celebrating a key
Speaker 3: to quote stems from nostalgia and an attempt to escape
Speaker 3: the present. So what are the origins of a key
Speaker 3: to A key to marks the Assyrian and Babylonian New Year,
Speaker 3: and it is observed the first of April and last
Speaker 3: twelve days. The Akkadians and Chaldeans also have celebrated the holiday.
Speaker 3: Doctor Joseph is a tune fun fact. Zetun means olive,
Speaker 3: what a cute name. Doctor Joseph Zetun is an expert
Speaker 3: in Syrian history, and he is one of the historians
Speaker 3: who considers ake to quote the oldest recorded holiday in
Speaker 3: the history of the Near East. The earliest reference to
Speaker 3: this holiday dates back to twenty five hundred BC in
Speaker 3: er U are Er was an important Sumerian city state
Speaker 3: in ancient Mesopotamia, located at the site of modern Tel
Speaker 3: l Moreyed and South Irax dir Klar Governorate. According to
Speaker 3: Syrian researchers, the Akitu holiday was quote held for the
Speaker 3: Sumerian moon god Nana. For the Babylonians, it chronicled the
Speaker 3: god Marduk's victory over the goddess Timayat. During the Babylonian era.
Speaker 3: The first four days were traditionally reserved for religious rituals.
Speaker 3: Babylonians used to offer prayers and sacrifices and recite the
Speaker 3: anuma Alish, which is the Babylonian epic of creation. The
Speaker 3: remaining days would include social and political rituals. According to
Speaker 3: the researcher Hazad and Majidi, the Sumerians observed this holiday
Speaker 3: on March twenty first of every year, and this marked
Speaker 3: the start of the Sumerian New Year. On the other hand,
Speaker 3: Semitic peoples like the Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, they celebrate a
Speaker 3: key to on April first. What is this word a
Speaker 3: key to? I asked the same thing. I asked the
Speaker 3: mom the same thing, because I'm still a child who
Speaker 3: thinks my mom knows everything, but she doesn't. She doesn't
Speaker 3: know what that means. She's ever even heard the word,
Speaker 3: and she didn't know the origin of a ke to.
Speaker 3: And apparently there's no consensus among historians on the exact
Speaker 3: meaning of this word. However, researcher On Majdi details his
Speaker 3: theory in the books Summer Corpus and Prehistoric Religions and Beliefs.
Speaker 3: According to m. Majidi, the word a key to is
Speaker 3: the name of the feast and the place where celebrations
Speaker 3: were held. The word appeared in late Sumerian texts as
Speaker 3: a key t. The word is then believed to be
Speaker 3: of Sumerian origin. The sign ah means rain, Ki means earth,
Speaker 3: and t is a verb meaning to draw near. Thus
Speaker 3: it roughly translates to drawing water closer to the earth.
Speaker 3: Very poetic, according to jam M Shahin, numerous ancient scriptures
Speaker 3: mentioned the same aki t. For instance, the holiday bears
Speaker 3: the name Akitu in Aramaic, Akiti sunonym in Sumerian, Visha,
Speaker 3: Deshata in Akkadian, and Rabi Nissan in Assyrian. Nissan, by
Speaker 3: the way, is April in Arabic. The shah Deshaeta and
Speaker 3: Krabi Nissan are often used in the Levante to mean
Speaker 3: head of the year and first of April, respectively. On
Speaker 3: the other hand, doctor Mahmud Hossein and Amen wrote that
Speaker 3: the celebrations were held at a specific location known as
Speaker 3: the House of Celebrations or Akitu, which was outside the city,
Speaker 3: so this makes a k to a location as well
Speaker 3: well a sacred location. In ancient beliefs, the Akitu house
Speaker 3: refers to the gods dwelling on earth. The purpose of
Speaker 3: having a celebratory feast is to celebrate the gods choosing
Speaker 3: to temporarily reside in this city, and the purpose of
Speaker 3: this house is to guard and cherish that moment forever.
Speaker 3: And Even though now the name Nissan is used for
Speaker 3: what we know as the month of April, the month
Speaker 3: of Nissan used to be around the time of the
Speaker 3: vernal equinox, which starts around March twenty first. The vernal
Speaker 3: equinox is still celebrated throughout Greater Iran as Nurus, which
Speaker 3: means new Day on March twenty first. However, in ancient Assyrian,
Speaker 3: Akkadian and Babylonian traditions, the spring festival was celebrated in
Speaker 3: the first days of the month known as Nissan, and
Speaker 3: the calendar adopted by ancient Assyrians had the month Nissan
Speaker 3: at the beginning of the calendar year, which lends to
Speaker 3: the term Kabi Nissan or the first of Nissan. So
Speaker 3: let's talk about the Syrian calendar and April Fool's Day
Speaker 3: what we all came here for. By the fact, about me,
Speaker 3: my birthday is today, April fools Day.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 3: And I didn't even know about this history, as I said,
Speaker 3: until I was an adult person in my mid twenties.
Speaker 3: But once I learned about this history, especially as a
Speaker 3: Syrian person who was really proud to be Syrian, it
Speaker 3: really made me appreciate my birthday and my ancestry a
Speaker 3: lot more because growing up, not gonna lie, it's honestly
Speaker 3: a pain in the ass birthday. Lots of empty gift
Speaker 3: boxes and people saying Happy Birthday, April Fools and just
Speaker 3: me like rolling my eyes and grimacing throughout the entire day.
Speaker 3: There is one particularly traumatic memory I have from middle
Speaker 3: school where I was given a box of chocolates and
Speaker 3: the joke was that the chocolates tasted like shit. And
Speaker 3: I know this because I tasted a chocolate and then
Speaker 3: I immediately spit it out. And to this day, I
Speaker 3: don't know what that chocolate was made out of, and
Speaker 3: I hope I never find out, But anyway, it's just
Speaker 3: a weird ass birthday to have you know what else
Speaker 3: is weird? Weird ass ads, listen and we are back. Okay.
Speaker 3: Doctor ze Tune believes it is more accurate to call
Speaker 3: the calendar that starts at April first as a Syrian
Speaker 3: calendar rather than Assyrian, since all in Syria and Mesopotamia
Speaker 3: adopted it. He also thinks that the ancient Syrian calendar
Speaker 3: begins on the first of April, and that quote This
Speaker 3: calendar was present and endured in multiple Syrian civilizations, including
Speaker 3: the kingdoms of Ugadit, Elba, Mari, Palmyra, and Damascus until
Speaker 3: the early twentieth century. Syrians traditionally began their year in
Speaker 3: April first, but transitioned to the Western calendar during the
Speaker 3: period of the French mandate, so it actually wasn't even
Speaker 3: that long ago that April first marked the beginning of
Speaker 3: the new year in Syria. The rituals of Assyrian New
Speaker 3: Year are linked to April Fools. There are rituals aimed
Speaker 3: at quote humbling the king, which would start from the
Speaker 3: fifth day of the celebrations. Lying was also a big
Speaker 3: part of the celebrations, as the king would abdicate his
Speaker 3: throne in favor of a criminal sentenced to death. That
Speaker 3: part is crazy to me. Enslaved people also became masters,
Speaker 3: and people disguise themselves in costumes and masks to hide
Speaker 3: their identities until they awoke from the lie the next morning.
Speaker 3: So the whole day would be a farce essentially, and
Speaker 3: you would all knowingly live a lie until the next
Speaker 3: day everything is suddenly backed normal again. Hannasumi, head of
Speaker 3: the Syriac Cultural Association in Syria, said, after the common
Speaker 3: folk occupies the king's throne, he blends in with the
Speaker 3: people incognito. Chaos ensues in Babylon and on the first
Speaker 3: of April, the king is found and joy prevails, and
Speaker 3: that is the origin of April Fool's Day. The king
Speaker 3: did not truly disappear, It was but a charade. There's
Speaker 3: also another reason the first of April is associated with
Speaker 3: an April fool, doctor Shaheen writes. Until fifteen sixty four AD,
Speaker 3: the Syrian calendar was adopted in most countries. In France,
Speaker 3: celebrations started on March twenty first and ended on April first,
Speaker 3: just as the Assyrians and Babylonians did thousands of years ago.
Speaker 3: After King Charles the ninth adopted the new Gregorian calendar,
Speaker 3: celebrations began on December twenty fifth and ended January first,
Speaker 3: which we now all know is the beginning of the
Speaker 3: new year. However, some of the publics still continued to
Speaker 3: celebrate on April first, and the people who still held
Speaker 3: onto this tradition became the target of mockery by the
Speaker 3: nobility for still believing in April Fool's Day. Other historians
Speaker 3: speculate that April fools Day dates back to fifteen eighty two,
Speaker 3: when France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar,
Speaker 3: as called for by the Council of Trent in fifteen six.
Speaker 3: In the Julian calendar, as well as the Syrian calendar
Speaker 3: and also the Hindu calendar, the new year began with
Speaker 3: the Spring equinox on April first, but people were slow
Speaker 3: to get the news or they failed to recognize that
Speaker 3: the start of the new year had moved to January first.
Speaker 3: Those who continue to celebrate the new year during the
Speaker 3: last week of March through April first became the butt
Speaker 3: of jokes and hoaxes, and were called April Fools. These
Speaker 3: pranks included having paper fish placed on their backs and
Speaker 3: being referred to as april fish in French, which is
Speaker 3: possan di'avril. I can't say that correctly, and I can't
Speaker 3: even attempt to do a French accent. But it's the
Speaker 3: april fish you refer to as an april fish and
Speaker 3: symbolizing a young, easily caught fish and a gullible person.
Speaker 3: So it's kind of like an elevated kick me sign
Speaker 3: on your back. Interestingly enough, fish are also considered a
Speaker 3: lucky symbol in many areas of the world, and are
Speaker 3: also important to many New Year's traditions. There was an
Speaker 3: opinion piece for a few years ago about the marginalization
Speaker 3: of the holiday of Akitu as part of a quote
Speaker 3: systemic battle against ancient civilizations. Doctor Shaheen noted that this
Speaker 3: prohibition has continued until recently. Different regimes and religious figures
Speaker 3: prohibited it because it is a pagan feast and has rituals, prayers,
Speaker 3: and texts that offend the followers of the monotheistic religions.
Speaker 3: He added that ak To is witnessing a renaissance among
Speaker 3: the Assyrian, Chaldean and Syriac communities abroad, particularly as a
Speaker 3: result of religious freedom. He asks will Akitu return or
Speaker 3: is it merely a trend that will fade away once again.
Speaker 3: Many cultures still recognize the significance of April first, including
Speaker 3: the Assyrians. Despite being scattered across the world, Assyrians preserve
Speaker 3: their history and heritage through holidays like Assyrian New Year
Speaker 3: on April first, Assyrian New Year is the spring festival
Speaker 3: among the indigenous Assyrians of non northern Iraq, northeastern Syria,
Speaker 3: southeastern Turkey, and northwestern Iran. Celebrations involve parades and parties, food, music,
Speaker 3: and dancing. Some Assyrians wear traditional costumes, are dressed like
Speaker 3: Assyrian royalty, and dance for hours. Celebrations take place throughout
Speaker 3: Assyria and other areas in the Middle East, along with
Speaker 3: some in the United States, Europe, and Australia among the
Speaker 3: Assyrian diaspora communities. The modern observance of aki To began
Speaker 3: in the nineteen sixties during the Assyrian intellectual Renaissance. However,
Speaker 3: due to political oppression, the celebrations were largely private until
Speaker 3: the nineteen nineties, but the event is still largely celebrated
Speaker 3: by Assyrians residing in Syria. Although the Syrian government does
Speaker 3: not acknowledge the festival at all, Assyrians still continue with
Speaker 3: the celebration. In two thousand and two, Assyrians and Syria
Speaker 3: celebrated the event with a mass wedding of sixteen couples
Speaker 3: and over twenty five thousand attendees. After the formation of Turkey,
Speaker 3: Kabi Nissan, along with no Ruz, were banned from public celebration.
Speaker 3: Assyrians and Turkey were first allowed to publicly celebrate Kabi
Speaker 3: Nissan in two thousand and five after organizers received permission
Speaker 3: from the government to stage the event and light of
Speaker 3: democratic reforms adopted in support of Turkey's EU membership. Bid
Speaker 3: Around five thousand people, including large groups of visiting ethnic
Speaker 3: Assyrians from Europe, Syria and Iraq took part in the
Speaker 3: Kabi Nissan celebrations in Turkey. One of the largest Assyrian
Speaker 3: New Year celebrations took place in Iraq in two thousand
Speaker 3: and eight. Public celebrations were not allowed by Saddam Hussein's
Speaker 3: regime prior to the start of the Iraq War. The
Speaker 3: event was organized by the Assyrian Democratic Movement ZOA and
Speaker 3: between forty five thousand and sixty five thousand people took
Speaker 3: part in the parade. In two thousand and four, George
Speaker 3: Ridanovich of the California State Assembly recognized the Assyrian New
Speaker 3: Year in a extended his wishes to the Assyrian community
Speaker 3: in California. This was later followed by a letter from
Speaker 3: our old California governor, Terminator Arnold to the Assyrian community
Speaker 3: in California, congratulating them on the annual celebration. I just
Speaker 3: thought that was pretty interesting because it is a very
Speaker 3: modern resurgence and like renaissance of this day. So fun
Speaker 3: facts and in the United States, almost four million Americans
Speaker 3: can trace their roots back to an Arab country located
Speaker 3: in the Middle East or North Africa. And this is
Speaker 3: according to the Arab American Institute. Each year, many school districts, cities,
Speaker 3: and states observe Arab American Heritage Month in April. It's
Speaker 3: meant to honor the historic achievements and cultural contributions of
Speaker 3: Arab Americans throughout the nation. On April first, twenty twenty two,
Speaker 3: April was officially designated as National Arab American Heritage Month
Speaker 3: by the federal government. The movement for this recognition was
Speaker 3: first started in nineteen teen eighty nine, when Congress declared
Speaker 3: October twenty fifth as a day to honor Arab American
Speaker 3: Heritage and called it National Arab American Day, but the
Speaker 3: Arab American community pushed for further recognition. In twenty seventeen,
Speaker 3: a media outlet called Arab America, as well as a
Speaker 3: nonprofit Arab America Foundation, launched an initiative that called all
Speaker 3: lawmakers to make April National Arab American Heritage Month. Arab
Speaker 3: America said that April was chosen because it did not
Speaker 3: conflict with other observances that highlight marginalized communities, and that
Speaker 3: the month symbolizes hope, growth and new beginnings. And yeah,
Speaker 3: sure that can be true with spring starting and flowers
Speaker 3: blooming and so on, but I think there might be
Speaker 3: a little more symbolism there as well. Personally, I think
Speaker 3: all national holidays are kind of useless unless you get
Speaker 3: like a day off from work, and giving a marginalized
Speaker 3: community a day or a month is a rather shallow
Speaker 3: and also useless acknowledgement of that community. I mean, Columbus
Speaker 3: also has a day himself, and even though many states
Speaker 3: now observe it as Indigenous People's Day, sixteen states as
Speaker 3: well as the territory of American Samoa still observe the
Speaker 3: second Monday in October as the official public holiday exclusively
Speaker 3: called Columbus Day. All this is to say that I
Speaker 3: would rather lawmakers actually advocate for marginalized communities instead of
Speaker 3: just tossing them a day or a few weeks where
Speaker 3: suddenly they exist. It is still kind of cute to
Speaker 3: me that Arab American Heritage Month is starting today in
Speaker 3: April because of all the symbolism. Let's take our second break.
Speaker 3: I don't have a clever segue. Oh well, and we
Speaker 3: are back.
Speaker 5: Okay.
Speaker 3: Where else have we seen April fools Day in the world.
Speaker 3: April Fool's Day has a shockingly global history for a
Speaker 3: holiday devote to lies and deception. Historians have also linked
Speaker 3: April Fool's Day to festivals such as Hilaria and ancient Rome.
Speaker 3: Hilaria is Latin for joyful, and this day was celebrated
Speaker 3: in ancient Rome at the end of March by followers
Speaker 3: of the cult of Sabelle. It involved people dressing up
Speaker 3: in disguises and mocking fellow citizens and even magistrates, and
Speaker 3: it was said to be inspired by the Egyptian legend
Speaker 3: of Isis, Osiris and Seth. There's also speculation that April
Speaker 3: Fool's Day was tied directly to the vernal equinox or
Speaker 3: the first day of spring in the Northern hemisphere, and
Speaker 3: this is where Mother Nature fooled people with changing, unpredictable weather.
Speaker 5: I like that one.
Speaker 3: In Latin America, you have few chances to be pranked.
Speaker 3: Much of Latin America celebrates Eldiya Delos and Ascentis or
Speaker 3: Day of the Innocence, which is a late December Catholic
Speaker 3: feast with an extremely unsilly origin that has now somehow
Speaker 3: become a day of jokes and pranks. In Ebbi elec
Speaker 3: Pant Spain, they mark this day aka they are April
Speaker 3: Fool's Day in December by having a town wide food fight,
Speaker 3: complete with military strategy and historical lore. Then there's the
Speaker 3: Els and Fernat's tradition, which is reportedly more than two
Speaker 3: hundred years old and involves a mock military style takeover
Speaker 3: of the town where the new rulers get to make
Speaker 3: up strange laws that others have to abide by, and
Speaker 3: if they don't, they get fined and the money goes
Speaker 3: to charity. When I was reading this earlier, I was like, oh,
Speaker 3: this is the purge, but then it ends up money
Speaker 3: goes to charity and it's like, oh, it's nice, but
Speaker 3: so for those cultures, the day to watch out for
Speaker 3: is December twenty eighth. In Brazil, however, April first is
Speaker 3: still the prank day of choice, and they cut straight
Speaker 3: to the chase by congate Dia das Mantidas, or the
Speaker 3: Day of Lies. Similarly to Syria, Iran has one of
Speaker 3: the oldest April Fool's traditions with the observance of Sista Badud,
Speaker 3: which also has a prank playing element. It is celebrated
Speaker 3: on the thirteenth day of the Persian New Year, on
Speaker 3: April first or April second. SiZ Da Badad, which is
Speaker 3: also said to have been celebrated as far back as
Speaker 3: the fifth century BC, is translated as quote getting rid
Speaker 3: of thirteen, so it has an appropriately superstitious air. It's
Speaker 3: also considered a spring festival, which ties into other April
Speaker 3: Fool's predecessors, like the ancient Roman celebration of Hilaria. April
Speaker 3: Fool's Day spread throughout Britain during the eighteenth century. In Scotland,
Speaker 3: the tradition became a two day event, starting with quote
Speaker 3: hunting the gouk that's a word gowk gouk is a
Speaker 3: term for a type of bird, but it's also slang
Speaker 3: for a fool on this day pranking. Scot's send unsuspecting
Speaker 3: Gouq's the people, not the birds on fool's errands just
Speaker 3: to waste their time, And if you don't get gouchd,
Speaker 3: there's always an opportunity for humiliation the very next day,
Speaker 3: which is Tallly Day. Tallly Day is for largely harmless
Speaker 3: Darriere related pranks aka pranks involving your butt, such as
Speaker 3: pinning fake tales on someone or sticking Kickney signs on them.
Speaker 3: April first in Poland goes about it the same as
Speaker 3: any other pro April Fool's place. It's called Prima aprilis.
Speaker 3: There is a funny parting phrase for prankers, though that
Speaker 3: I thought was worth mentioning, which is Prima aprilis April
Speaker 3: Fool's Day, be careful, you can be wrong, which is
Speaker 3: truly like advice to take throughout the entire year. But
Speaker 3: what about what we've come to know as the typical
Speaker 3: April Fool's Day pranks. It's not especially surprising that capitalism
Speaker 3: took like a fun little day like April Fool's Day
Speaker 3: and ran with it because, as we know, we live
Speaker 3: in hell. But in modern times, people have gone to
Speaker 3: great lengths to create elaborate April fools Day hoaxes. Newspapers,
Speaker 3: radio and TV stations, and websites have participated in the
Speaker 3: April First tradition of reporting outrageous fictional claims that have
Speaker 3: fooled their audiences. A few examples. In nineteen fifty seven,
Speaker 3: the BBC reported that Swiss farmers were experiencing a record
Speaker 3: spaghetti crop and showed footage of people harvesting noodles from trees.
Speaker 3: In nineteen eighty five, Sports Illustrated writer George Plimpton tricked
Speaker 3: many readers when he ran a made up article about
Speaker 3: a rookie picture named Sid Finch who could throw a
Speaker 3: fastball over one hundred and sixty eight miles per hour.
Speaker 3: In nineteen ninety two, National Public Radio ran a spot
Speaker 3: with former President Richard Nixon saying that he was running
Speaker 3: for president again, Only it was an actor, not Nixon,
Speaker 3: and this segment was all in April Fool's Day prank
Speaker 3: that caught the country by surprise. In nineteen ninety six,
Speaker 3: Taco Bell duped people when it announced that it agreed
Speaker 3: to purchase Philadelphia's Liberty Bell and intended to rename it
Speaker 3: the Taco Liberty Bell. In nineteen ninety eight, after Burger
Speaker 3: King advertised a quote left handed whopper, scores of clueless
Speaker 3: customers requested this fake sandwich and then Google also notoriously
Speaker 3: hosts an annual April fools Day prank that has included
Speaker 3: everything from a telepathic search to the ability to play
Speaker 3: pac Man on Google Maps. This is a sentence that
Speaker 3: made me laugh from History dot Com. For the average trickster,
Speaker 3: there is always the classic April fools Day prank of
Speaker 3: covering the toilet seat with plastic wrap or swapping the
Speaker 3: contents of sugar and salt containers. I'm sorry I had
Speaker 3: to mention that, because like the sugar and salt is
Speaker 3: very innocent, But I for one have never heard of
Speaker 3: covering the toilet and plastic wrap. That seems cruel and
Speaker 3: crazy in History dot com.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 3: Anyway, Impressively, the joke of April Fool's Day has endured
Speaker 3: for centuries, and at this point to have my life
Speaker 3: contribute any part to this joke is an honor. Actually,
Speaker 3: I live for bits in April Fool's Day is basically
Speaker 3: the longest running bit of all time. So it was
Speaker 3: only right that I was born today and that, my friends,
Speaker 3: is our episode today. I hope you had fun. Now
Speaker 3: I'm gonna go do something for my birthday, even though
Speaker 3: this is the past, but today is my birthday and
Speaker 3: I'm doing something now for you. Anyway, that's it.
Speaker 4: Bye, Welcome to Jack it Apping here a podcast about
Speaker 4: things falling apart and putting it back together again. We're
Speaker 4: going fasten this intro because we have a lot of
Speaker 4: stuff to get to and the thing that we have
Speaker 4: a lot of stuff to get to about is the
Speaker 4: election for candidates for the Council of Presidents for National
Speaker 4: Nurses United. And in order to talk about that, and
Speaker 4: we're talking about that, I you know, okay, I shoul
Speaker 4: I should should have ran this one through in my
Speaker 4: head before we started this. But yeah, I'm here today
Speaker 4: with John Jahad and Rosa to talk about Yeah, there's
Speaker 4: slate movement thing I don't know called shift Change and
Speaker 4: why they're running, how they met, et cetera, et cetera,
Speaker 4: and yeah, some other stuff about the union. So all
Speaker 4: three of you, welcome to the show.
Speaker 6: Thank you, thank you, thank you for having us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so I guess the place we should start for
Speaker 4: this for so we we talked to shift Change last year,
Speaker 4: but I think for people who don't remember that or
Speaker 4: you know, I mean, it's been God, I don't know,
Speaker 4: I don't know how long I've lost track of time.
Speaker 4: Can you explain a bit about what you're running for,
Speaker 4: and I mean specifically what it is, sort of how
Speaker 4: it works.
Speaker 7: I'll just start real quick, like in cases it's not clear.
Speaker 7: We're all members of a large national nurses union called
Speaker 7: National Nurses United, and so we're from individual parts of
Speaker 7: that union, which is kind of an umbrella over California
Speaker 7: Nurses Association and National Nurses Organizing Committee, which I'm a
Speaker 7: part of, Brazil as a part of Minnesota Nurses Association,
Speaker 7: which jahead, is a part of NAISNA, which is New
Speaker 7: York State nurs Association, which Sanya Green is a part of.
Speaker 7: And then we also have Michigan Nurses Association and the
Speaker 7: DC Nurses Association and our group shift Change is like
Speaker 7: a caucus, which is like whenever workers instead of a
Speaker 7: union get together because they want to change how the
Speaker 7: union works. And we're running what's something called a slate
Speaker 7: where we have to have groups of people running together
Speaker 7: for specific union offices, and so we have a lot
Speaker 7: of people running not just US three or US four
Speaker 7: for the Council presidents, but we also have Canadas running
Speaker 7: for the Board of Vice presidents and also delegates for
Speaker 7: our convention. And hopefully that's a good basis for this
Speaker 7: starting off the conversation.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so, I guess the first question I wanted to ask,
Speaker 4: because I think this is an interesting story is how
Speaker 4: did how did you meet? Because this is a mostly
Speaker 4: a very different group of people from last time.
Speaker 6: How did we meet?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 6: My, that is a good story.
Speaker 8: So if you're not aware, or if you've been living
Speaker 8: under a rock, you know there's there's a lot of
Speaker 8: violence that's happening in the world, and specifically there's violence
Speaker 8: that's happening in Palestine. And John, I and Jahad all
Speaker 8: met as nurses who were looking to really be involved
Speaker 8: in Palestine solidarity.
Speaker 6: Work, and so we met on a space.
Speaker 8: We connected there and you know, our politics pretty much
Speaker 8: aligned that.
Speaker 6: We believe that oppressed people should be liberated.
Speaker 8: And that was one of the largest ways that we
Speaker 8: met each other and we became I mean, I feel
Speaker 8: like Jahad and John are part of my family. Definitely,
Speaker 8: we have really connected on the solidarity front for that,
Speaker 8: but also as nurses organizing and really seeing where the
Speaker 8: false law fault lines are within our own union.
Speaker 4: We haven't talked about specifically the nurses organizing has been
Speaker 4: going on for Palestine and solidarity stuff on the show before.
Speaker 4: It's really interesting.
Speaker 9: Even though we haven't met in person yet. We're looking
Speaker 9: forward to meeting in April at the Labor Notes conference.
Speaker 9: But despite the fact that we haven't met in person,
Speaker 9: there is a lot of chemistry among the group and
Speaker 9: we have a lot of you know, similar visions, and
Speaker 9: especially when it came to organizing for Palestine. So I
Speaker 9: joined Resita and John and others and Nurses for Palestine
Speaker 9: chat group and that group is active in highlighting the
Speaker 9: suffering of the Palestinian people and the politics behind it
Speaker 9: and how nurses can be in the front lines not
Speaker 9: only to take care of patients, but also for other
Speaker 9: healthcare workers around the world. And that's a huge part
Speaker 9: of this because this genocide that's going on has claimed
Speaker 9: the lives of so many innocent civilians as well as
Speaker 9: physicians and nurses and other healthcare workers, medics, etc. From
Speaker 9: that big group, or almost you can call it national.
Speaker 9: There are smaller chapters now in different cities. There's healthcare
Speaker 9: Workers for Palestine twin cities where I am from, and
Speaker 9: Chicago and San Francisco, and there's in Seattle and Boston.
Speaker 9: There's a lot of movement among healthcare workers where they
Speaker 9: focus their attention that hospitals, health care facilities, healthcare professionals
Speaker 9: are not a target during a military conflict and all
Speaker 9: the war crimes that have been committed need to be
Speaker 9: answered for. So from that we kind of sprouted a
Speaker 9: smaller group, and with the election coming up for the
Speaker 9: National Nurses United, we thought we could take that more
Speaker 9: of a like a grassroots movement to make a bigger change,
Speaker 9: because we believe, you know, all these smaller changes in
Speaker 9: the base should lead to a bigger change at the top,
Speaker 9: and unions are the perfect example where we can affect
Speaker 9: change and you know, have the politicians and all the
Speaker 9: people up in the highest echelon powers if you will
Speaker 9: listen and do what actually the base needs. And you know,
Speaker 9: there's no better way of doing it but having your
Speaker 9: own union representing what the nurses in the union want
Speaker 9: and their policies and statements should reflect what the nurses need,
Speaker 9: and that's what we're here, and that's why we call
Speaker 9: ourselves Shift Change.
Speaker 7: One thing I wanted to add on to that is that,
Speaker 7: like when we first all came together, there was a
Speaker 7: call from palsening trade unions to push our own trade
Speaker 7: unions here in the US, which have historically not really
Speaker 7: taken strong positions on things like international conflicts or you
Speaker 7: know what's going on in Palestine in particular. And our
Speaker 7: union just adopted BDS language within the last year, the
Speaker 7: California nurs Association National Nurses Organizing Committee, and that took
Speaker 7: an extraordinary amount of pressure from rank and file nurses
Speaker 7: to get the leadership to agree that this was an
Speaker 7: important stance. We noticed that unions had just gone through
Speaker 7: democratic reform processes who have been taken over by rank
Speaker 7: and file workers. UA with Sean Fayn had adopted much
Speaker 7: more like much quickly, much more quickly resolutions in favor
Speaker 7: of peace and ceasefire. And you know, as workers were
Speaker 7: like against war of all kinds. And but in particular
Speaker 7: this is like a particularly egregious situation where nurses have
Speaker 7: borne the brunts of like all the healthcare workers who
Speaker 7: are being targeted specifically, and palisfied in Gaza, the majority
Speaker 7: of those of those healthcare workers are nurses, so we
Speaker 7: believe there's a direct connection between you know, our work
Speaker 7: here and the support of those nurses over there. And
Speaker 7: I guess then going from that to leaning towards how
Speaker 7: our building a democratic rank and file union. Not only
Speaker 7: will it enact these be a way for us to
Speaker 7: enact the kind of positive policy changes we want, but
Speaker 7: it'll build a stronger union for everybody that we can
Speaker 7: fight the bosses at the bedside making sure that our
Speaker 7: patients are taking care of our communities. So I'll let it.
Speaker 1: Go, you know.
Speaker 4: So that's a bit of a segue into the next
Speaker 4: thing I wanted to ask about, which was, Okay, so
Speaker 4: you've talked about sort of you've talked about how you
Speaker 4: all met through like Palcini salid Are you're organizing how
Speaker 4: that's one of the important things for why y'all are
Speaker 4: doing this. But I wanted to say, yeah, so if
Speaker 4: you can go into more detail about the specific things
Speaker 4: that brought you to running for this.
Speaker 7: Rosita, why don't you give a little bit of an
Speaker 7: account of your story of how you first heard about
Speaker 7: shift changes like, I think, because I think that's kind
Speaker 7: of that I think that would be fun.
Speaker 8: So I first heard of Shift Changed last year, and
Speaker 8: you know, I was very apprehensive.
Speaker 6: I was like, oh, wow, who's this new group that's
Speaker 6: coming in?
Speaker 8: And you know, I kept I was hearing from my
Speaker 8: very own union that you know, there was a group
Speaker 8: out there that was challenging and that maybe had gotten
Speaker 8: some things wrong, and you know, they just you know,
Speaker 8: needed to kind of be put aside. And so I
Speaker 8: did join one of the calls. There was an outreach
Speaker 8: call to kind of figure out whose shift Change is,
Speaker 8: and I thought it was pretty interesting. I thought, you know,
Speaker 8: here are some very motivated union members who see that
Speaker 8: there's something that needs to change within our union, which
Speaker 8: is part of what we do as organizers. We see
Speaker 8: that there may be something that needs to change even
Speaker 8: within our own union, and we as rank and file,
Speaker 8: or we as union members should be able to have
Speaker 8: that voice to change it. And what I was seeing
Speaker 8: was that their voice was being really suppressed. Instead of saying, hey,
Speaker 8: how can we move towards what you're asking and really
Speaker 8: come to a place where we can understand where you're
Speaker 8: coming from. Instead it was no We're not going to
Speaker 8: listen to their voices. We're not going to you know,
Speaker 8: even engage with this group. They're this rogue group out
Speaker 8: there that's like, you know, causing all this ruckus, which
Speaker 8: makes me, you know, I'm somebody who loves and gravitates
Speaker 8: towards ruckus.
Speaker 6: That's just my personality. So it just made me more curious.
Speaker 8: And then, you know, when we started organizing for you know,
Speaker 8: the Palestine Solidarity, John came in and I was like,
Speaker 8: oh wait, I think I know this guy, like, you know,
Speaker 8: he's one of those shift change guys.
Speaker 6: And it just made me more curious.
Speaker 8: And you know, we've had great conversations and I really
Speaker 8: really understand, you know, the motivation, and because of some
Speaker 8: things that have happened to me within our union that
Speaker 8: has made me really recognize there are ways that we
Speaker 8: can make positive changes for our union, and as organizers,
Speaker 8: as nurses, we have to strive for those and we
Speaker 8: have to have the ability to have our voices heard
Speaker 8: and to motivate each other to make those changes.
Speaker 6: Because if we.
Speaker 8: Are the union, then we should be able to change
Speaker 8: our union towards what we want to see out of
Speaker 8: our union.
Speaker 6: And that's probably the most important thing.
Speaker 7: I was gonna say, jahead, do you want to talk
Speaker 7: a little bit about your experience with the Minnesota Nurse
Speaker 7: Association strike in twenty twenty two and then watching the
Speaker 7: Nurses Forward people, because I think that kind of ties in.
Speaker 4: Well, sorry, before we do that, we have to do
Speaker 4: an ad break before. I'm also gonna get yelled at
Speaker 4: my bosses at break ay, ads, all right, we're back,
Speaker 4: We're back from ads hell.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's do this.
Speaker 9: I thought my two cents would be a good fit
Speaker 9: after what Rusida just said. Everybody has their own unique
Speaker 9: experience and how they became interested. I'm a member of
Speaker 9: Minnesota Nurses Association and we went to unstrike two years
Speaker 9: ago to request and demand better contract with the Fairview
Speaker 9: system here in the Twin Cities area. Eventually there was
Speaker 9: a contract that it was ratified. After that there was
Speaker 9: an election. And even though I'm a member, an active member,
Speaker 9: I serve on some committees with M and A, and
Speaker 9: recently I joined the Government Affairs Committee. You know, having
Speaker 9: been really engaged in the politics of the union until
Speaker 9: a new slate another troublemakers, if you will, another group
Speaker 9: of troublemakers, you know, who call themselves Nurse Nurses Forward.
Speaker 9: They ran against the current board and actually they won.
Speaker 9: They won a landslide last November, and that was a
Speaker 9: huge change and an inspiration for me. Really rank and
Speaker 9: file nurses and they're all, you know, nurses working the
Speaker 9: on the floors, and I know some of them personally,
Speaker 9: and I trusted these guys knew what they're talking about,
Speaker 9: and they they were running on a platform that made
Speaker 9: sense where all the rank and file nurses have a
Speaker 9: say and they are well informed because there's a lot
Speaker 9: of stuff that goes behind doors that nurses are not
Speaker 9: brevy to and that, you know, makes things sound a
Speaker 9: little shady sometimes where you know, unions are, say, endorsing
Speaker 9: a politician and this politician kind of drops the ball
Speaker 9: or does something that's not in the interest of the union,
Speaker 9: and yet they're still supporting them. We need to know
Speaker 9: why and how that came to be. So that kind
Speaker 9: of gave me an inspiration and the moment John came
Speaker 9: and recruited me, if you will, and I thought, sure,
Speaker 9: you know, if we if we can do affects some
Speaker 9: change in the local level, I think it's time to
Speaker 9: change at the national level. So we're hoping for the
Speaker 9: best here and we're trying to do our best to
Speaker 9: get a good result.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I mean
Speaker 4: that was some thing I remember from last time. Is
Speaker 4: this this issue of transparency in this issue of the
Speaker 4: union acting. I don't know if autonomously is the right word,
Speaker 4: but the union acting just sort of doing stuff that
Speaker 4: members were just like finding out about afterwards. Yeah, and
Speaker 4: you know, I don't know, I think like that's on
Speaker 4: a kind of basic I mean, there's obviously a political
Speaker 4: level to it, but on just the sort of basic
Speaker 4: what is a union level, you would think that the
Speaker 4: union wouldn't be doing that, and yet Comma, I was just.
Speaker 6: Going to comment on that.
Speaker 8: I think one of the biggest parallels that I've been
Speaker 8: able to see is, you know, we spend a lot
Speaker 8: of time of our as nurses fighting against the hospital industry.
Speaker 8: Right it's the big Boss, as we call it. You know,
Speaker 8: we march on the Boss, or you know, we have
Speaker 8: you know, rallies around it, or we do petitions, and
Speaker 8: you know, we're constantly fighting this big entity of the
Speaker 8: hospital industry, which oftentimes keeps us in the dark about
Speaker 8: policies or about changes that they're making or you know,
Speaker 8: various things, and I can't help but to see the
Speaker 8: parallels between our fight with the hospital industry and then
Speaker 8: comes our.
Speaker 6: Fight with our own union.
Speaker 8: So you know, how can we within our union change
Speaker 8: that so that we're not seeing both entities as the same.
Speaker 8: I don't want to be in a union that I
Speaker 8: also am feeling is the same entity that we are
Speaker 8: fighting a bedside. So that transparency for us is extremely important.
Speaker 8: That autonomy, that accountability is extremely important, because why should
Speaker 8: we be having two parallel fights with our own union
Speaker 8: and with the hospital industry.
Speaker 7: I was just going to say, like that the that's
Speaker 7: what the what inspired us the first time around was
Speaker 7: that it felt like we were struggling both against Like
Speaker 7: you've got to fight against management. Why do I have
Speaker 7: to also at the same time turn around and fight
Speaker 7: like with union staff about basic stuff. That's like all
Speaker 7: they have to do is like nurses are really smart.
Speaker 7: I know, it's hard, Like it's a shocking idea that
Speaker 7: nurses might know a thing or two and the idea
Speaker 7: that we that they have to come up and focus
Speaker 7: group amongst themselves to tell us what our values are.
Speaker 1: Right, Like I think I.
Speaker 7: Can walk around my unit and I can tell I
Speaker 7: can find out what nurses values are real fast. I mean,
Speaker 7: we may not all agree on every single thing, right,
Speaker 7: there's a there's a pretty wide amount of ideological like
Speaker 7: alignment in our union. We're not all we're not all
Speaker 7: in locks up about everything except for how important it
Speaker 7: is that nurses are actually leading and driving how the
Speaker 7: union works. And so we have you know, the main
Speaker 7: core thing. And I think this is what's so important
Speaker 7: about union organizing in particular, is that you can set
Speaker 7: aside disagreements on one thing and you focus on the
Speaker 7: thing that's the that's your can your shared material interest
Speaker 7: regardless because we all do the same kind of work.
Speaker 7: It's really important.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And that's and that. Yeah, but that also makes
Speaker 4: it doubly important that the institution that you're using to
Speaker 4: do this is actually doing the things you wanted to
Speaker 4: do when not fighting you at every step. One of
Speaker 4: the things that you mentioned we were talking about this
Speaker 4: was how this kind of stuff in the union was
Speaker 4: impacting Powsinian solidarity organizing. I was wondering if you could
Speaker 4: talk a bit about that.
Speaker 8: Oh, I can, I can take that and then and
Speaker 8: Johad can actually add into it.
Speaker 6: But so I was part of Social Justice Committee.
Speaker 8: I was actually the chair for the entire California for
Speaker 8: n and U. And one of the biggest things is,
Speaker 8: you know, of course we're speaking out for our communities,
Speaker 8: we're speaking out for oppression, against oppression, and specifically for
Speaker 8: marginalized communities. So I thought it would be pretty easy
Speaker 8: for us to align ourselves with our resolutions that we
Speaker 8: had just passed. And actually October the eighth of twenty
Speaker 8: twenty three, and I.
Speaker 6: Ran across a lot of barriers.
Speaker 8: I wanted our union, my union, to put out a
Speaker 8: statement about a ceasefire, and to put out a statement
Speaker 8: about how bombing hospitals and killing our healthcare worker colleagues
Speaker 8: was wrong. And I was constantly, you know, barriers were
Speaker 8: put up. I was told I could not throw, I
Speaker 8: could not do a vigil, I could not initiate, that
Speaker 8: I could not to speak on behalf of me being
Speaker 8: a nurse, and so that infuriated me. I felt really
Speaker 8: really betrayed by my union that we had just signed
Speaker 8: all these resolutions specifically talking about aggression, talking about aparthei,
Speaker 8: and yet I was being told that I could not
Speaker 8: speak up and then I was ghosted on a few times.
Speaker 8: I would start sending emails. I was like, hey, what's
Speaker 8: you know going on? How come I can't do this?
Speaker 8: And there would be no answer. Or I would say, hey,
Speaker 8: I want to do a vigil. Nope, you can't do
Speaker 8: a vigil. Nope, there's no signs that you can use. Nope, nope, no.
Speaker 8: And so I just kept getting all these no answers,
Speaker 8: and a few of us got together, we got a
Speaker 8: petition going, and we sent it in. We're like, hey, look,
Speaker 8: these are all the reasons why we as nurses feel
Speaker 8: that we should be speaking out against what's happening right now.
Speaker 6: And this is even in the early times.
Speaker 8: Even you know, really in you know, the end of October,
Speaker 8: beginning of the next month, and you know, it took
Speaker 8: them a long time to get it out, and it
Speaker 8: was a very middle of the road statement. At that time,
Speaker 8: I had asked the Union to sign on and endorse
Speaker 8: one of the largest and one of the first union
Speaker 8: rallies in support of Palestine that had been called by
Speaker 8: the Palestinian trade unions specifically for us to rally around,
Speaker 8: and they refused, And on that morning I submitted publicly
Speaker 8: my resignation to the Racial Social Justice Committee. I felt
Speaker 8: that it was an absolute dishonor for me to sit
Speaker 8: in that position and to be the face of a
Speaker 8: committee that says it stands for social justice and yet
Speaker 8: was putting up barriers for us to speak out as nurses.
Speaker 6: And that really was a huge deal for me.
Speaker 8: It was a huge deal for many other people that
Speaker 8: saw that as a gesture of solidarity.
Speaker 6: But it was more.
Speaker 8: It was about my ethics and it was about my
Speaker 8: moral standing. I could not legitimately sit in that position
Speaker 8: while my union was stifling and censoring my voice.
Speaker 4: It's a brief thing that you'd take a stand like that,
Speaker 4: and it's also it's the right thing to do, and
Speaker 4: you should never have had to do this in the
Speaker 4: first place, like Jesus Christ. Oh, I don't know, I mean,
Speaker 4: I don't know. It's just deeply and incredibly frustrating, like
Speaker 4: just hearing hearing that and watching them just like ignore,
Speaker 4: ignore the things that they ignore, the resolutions that they
Speaker 4: just passed, and I don't know, that's absolutely terrible. I
Speaker 4: hope they lose hipocrisy much. Yeah.
Speaker 9: Yeah, Well, if I may add to what Rosita has
Speaker 9: just said, First of all I have to say, Rosita
Speaker 9: is the bravest person I know, and what her positions
Speaker 9: and her ethics are of the highest caliber. So I'm
Speaker 9: honored to be running with her during this time. You know,
Speaker 9: from example here in Minnesota, you know nurses as part
Speaker 9: of the government Affairs committee I was involved in. I
Speaker 9: came kind of toward the end, so I can't take
Speaker 9: credit for it, but it was the keeping nurses at
Speaker 9: the bedside bill. It was. It was adopted, was passed
Speaker 9: the House. Now in Minnesota we have all three branches
Speaker 9: basically in the hands of Democrats. It passed the House
Speaker 9: and the Senate, and yet the governor vetoed it. Why
Speaker 9: because there was pressure from corporate you know, the big
Speaker 9: wigs told him, if you do it, we're gonna pull
Speaker 9: some investment or something, or I don't know, maybe we
Speaker 9: won't have you on the board after you retire, something
Speaker 9: like that. So I don't know, but that kind of
Speaker 9: triggered us. It was really stabbing the back, if you will.
Speaker 9: But it's still you know, the union itself could do better.
Speaker 9: It can be more sensitive to its members' needs and
Speaker 9: their demands. For example, we were trying to get a
Speaker 9: resolution or a statement it was back in October about
Speaker 9: a ceasefire here through the union, even though it's I
Speaker 9: would say, inconsequential for them to say, but they even
Speaker 9: refused to hear the suggestion or the movement to issue
Speaker 9: a statement that was the old board. Towards the end
Speaker 9: of the of the reign of the old board, there
Speaker 9: was more effort. I think it was mid December and
Speaker 9: a week really watered down resolution was adopted calling few
Speaker 9: seas fire the new board team and the first or
Speaker 9: second meeting in January. In February there was a much
Speaker 9: more robust resolution that was adapted at a much higher
Speaker 9: you know, NAIs against versus yes versus names in that
Speaker 9: there was no needs. Actually there were some abstentions like
Speaker 9: three out of fourteen, so you know there is a movement.
Speaker 9: There's a grassroots rank and file nurses who are pushing
Speaker 9: towards change the same thing. I'm also not only a nurse,
Speaker 9: but also a nursing faculty at Minnesota State University in Makato,
Speaker 9: and I belong to another union, the faculty Union. In
Speaker 9: the very beginning, there was just kind of deafening silence.
Speaker 9: Nobody wants to hear anything. It reminded me of the
Speaker 9: period after nine to eleven. If you speak anything against
Speaker 9: the government or anything real critique what the government did
Speaker 9: or didn't do, you are on the other side. You know,
Speaker 9: remember that if you're not with us, you are against
Speaker 9: us argument, and it's the same thing.
Speaker 5: It was the same thing here.
Speaker 9: I know people who lost their jobs because they were
Speaker 9: speaking out for Palestine or against the atrocities that these
Speaker 9: radis were committing. And that's from within unions and healthcare organizations.
Speaker 9: People who lost their livelihoods because of it, and they
Speaker 9: are labeled as anti Semitic or anything like that. So
Speaker 9: they were trying to kind of silence people, scare them
Speaker 9: with all these labels and you know, illegitimate ways of
Speaker 9: really conducting a civil discourse or having someone hear a
Speaker 9: different point of view. So, you know, from that sprouted
Speaker 9: this huge movement among nurses and healthcare professionals that we
Speaker 9: want this to go wider, even at the national level
Speaker 9: during the primaries, where a lot of organizing was happening
Speaker 9: for you know, uncommitted votes for the primaries for Joe Biden,
Speaker 9: and that made them feel uh, you know, the pressure
Speaker 9: and as you can see, the US vetoed a ceasefire
Speaker 9: resolution I think three times before, and yet this week
Speaker 9: they allowed one to pass because there is a lot
Speaker 9: of political pressure because they are they are doing their
Speaker 9: own calculation, I understand, but it's still there is a
Speaker 9: grassroot movement that affects this change.
Speaker 7: I just want to tie in, like everything that we're
Speaker 7: saying around organizing, because I think so much a lot
Speaker 7: of people come to unions with the idea that this
Speaker 7: is how they you know, you get a chance to
Speaker 7: build a platform to make a case for the right policies, right,
Speaker 7: and we you know, we push things through legislation and
Speaker 7: lobbying and then for some reason, like a governor decides
Speaker 7: that they're not going to pass it. You know, our union,
Speaker 7: like my part of the union, California Association National Nurses
Speaker 7: Organizing Committee, this is redda's Part two was at one
Speaker 7: point powerful, like was so organized and so powerful that
Speaker 7: they forced the state of California, which is one of
Speaker 7: the largest economies in the world, to pass a ratio
Speaker 7: bill that was you know that the Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor,
Speaker 7: after what was passed that you know, those little nurses.
Speaker 7: I can't believe we're letting them do this. You know,
Speaker 7: our union at one point was powerful enough to help
Speaker 7: end Arnold Schwarzenegger's political career. And so when we talk
Speaker 7: about getting things passed, it requires a lot of power,
Speaker 7: and a lot of people don't understand the power means
Speaker 7: getting people together to commit to take collective action. That
Speaker 7: might mean occupying a capital, that might mean doing things
Speaker 7: that are a little bit outside the law right, but
Speaker 7: we understand that if we don't have the power, then
Speaker 7: none of these you know, ideal, idealistic things that we
Speaker 7: want to have see change in the world or happened
Speaker 7: in the world can happen. And we've seen when we're
Speaker 7: talking about this idea. If you're either with it's against
Speaker 7: us or against us people who are advocating for building
Speaker 7: that power, and that power comes through defending our contracts,
Speaker 7: defending our coworkers to grieve inspits, making sure that we
Speaker 7: are taking aggressive like action when it comes to strikes,
Speaker 7: and getting a strong contract language. In the first place.
Speaker 7: People who are advocating for that are being labeled like
Speaker 7: the enemy inside a union. It's very difficult when you
Speaker 7: put so much of your time and energy into union work,
Speaker 7: which anyone who's a committed unionist can tell you of
Speaker 7: all the countless amounts of their free time that they
Speaker 7: spend away from their family, away from their friends, away
Speaker 7: from their kids, doing the work of making sure that
Speaker 7: the union is strong. To be kind of accused of
Speaker 7: being not on the team right, or not being for
Speaker 7: everyone else, not being a team player, when you're always committed,
Speaker 7: you know, to building the power of the team. I mean,
Speaker 7: this is why we're running is because those of us
Speaker 7: who are making the case that we need to be
Speaker 7: an organized union. We need a union full of people
Speaker 7: who know how to how to fight, how to push back,
Speaker 7: how to stand up for those of us who might
Speaker 7: be weaker than others. To be labeled troublemakers or pains
Speaker 7: in the ads, or they even call us anti union
Speaker 7: or union busting, which is really just it hurts, right,
Speaker 7: It's very stressful, but it's worth it to us because
Speaker 7: our principles and our commitment to our coworkers and building
Speaker 7: a workplace that's a just place, a place that takes
Speaker 7: care of all the people in our communities, people who
Speaker 7: would otherwise be denied the care that they deserve. We
Speaker 7: know that we can only do that by being organized,
Speaker 7: building relationships and taking action together as a union to fight.
Speaker 7: And we know what that looks like. We have members
Speaker 7: of Shift Change who have been there when they've been
Speaker 7: occupying capital buildings, running politicians out of office. I want
Speaker 7: our union to be I tell everybody this. I want
Speaker 7: our union to be strong and powerful, and I want
Speaker 7: it to be frightening to people who stand in the
Speaker 7: way of nurses and our patients. And this is all connected.
Speaker 7: You know what we see, you know our government willing
Speaker 7: to let happen to people halfway across the world. I
Speaker 7: always tell people my coworkers, you know what we let
Speaker 7: our bosses get away with the least of us, it'll
Speaker 7: do to any of us if they had the chance.
Speaker 7: And so all of us come from the point of
Speaker 7: view that we have to build our power. That power
Speaker 7: has to be you know, honed through our fights at
Speaker 7: our work, making sure.
Speaker 5: That our.
Speaker 7: Working conditions are good, because we know when nurses have
Speaker 7: good working conditions, patients get the care they need. And
Speaker 7: when we're powerful and strong at the bedside, we can
Speaker 7: be powerful and strong out in the community where we
Speaker 7: need to take our fights. When we want to make
Speaker 7: the world a better place for everybody. You know, I
Speaker 7: don't think there's any coincidence that you know, Razita is,
Speaker 7: you know, an indigenous woman. Her family's from refugees from
Speaker 7: American foreign policy broad she had learned to be a
Speaker 7: nurse in Gaza. Zenia's family it's from the Dominican Republic.
Speaker 7: Her family like fled like a US back dictator there, Trahiro,
Speaker 7: And I don't think that there's any to me, there's no,
Speaker 7: it's not a coincidence that we're all here doing this
Speaker 7: work of building the kind of powerful union that we
Speaker 7: know that all of our coworkers deserve, that our communities deserve,
Speaker 7: the whole world deserves.
Speaker 6: Four troublemakers.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, someone, someone smarter than me, once said this one.
Speaker 9: Didn't someone say once that they've been called MAGA supporters
Speaker 9: or something.
Speaker 7: They were telling everybody that we were, uh, you know, weird,
Speaker 7: right wing, trumpy people. And I think that anyone who
Speaker 7: knows any of us but know that that is this
Speaker 7: the truth.
Speaker 1: But it is what it is.
Speaker 7: You know, the people will say whatever they have to
Speaker 7: say to scare people away from us, because that's easier
Speaker 7: than doing the right thing, which is to make sure
Speaker 7: that our union is a bottom up movement led by nurses.
Speaker 7: They're very afraid of us doing getting our stuff together
Speaker 7: because there's you know, there's always it's easier to get
Speaker 7: along with the boss and it is to get along
Speaker 7: with your coworkers sometimes. I think anyone will tell you
Speaker 7: that as long as that we all know people who
Speaker 7: are friends with the boss, because that's an easy thing
Speaker 7: to be. It's hard to stick up for people who
Speaker 7: otherwise can't stick up for themselves.
Speaker 6: Just in the in the you know, for our elections.
Speaker 8: So the fact that we're even running our union doesn't
Speaker 8: want everyone to know about elections, and the way that
Speaker 8: it's kind of we just give you the list that
Speaker 8: we're going to endorse, just vote for them, and no
Speaker 8: questions asked. That that's just how it should be. So
Speaker 8: the fact that, you know, there's not a lot of
Speaker 8: information about the elections that go on in the N
Speaker 8: and U. What does it mean? What does it mean
Speaker 8: to be in, you know, in a Council of Presidents?
Speaker 8: What does it even mean to be a delegate? We
Speaker 8: are often spoon fed the delegate position, just be a
Speaker 8: delegate and then not told exactly what that means. What
Speaker 8: does that mean for us? What does that mean in
Speaker 8: our resolutions? What does that mean when we go to convention?
Speaker 8: Those things should not be a mystery to us. We
Speaker 8: shouldn't have to poke in prod to get that information
Speaker 8: about elections, and so that's also one of the things
Speaker 8: that we're trying to highlight as well. We should be
Speaker 8: very informed. And I think that's also another parallel between
Speaker 8: our US government who chooses you know, they kind of
Speaker 8: sometimes expect us not to go to the polls because
Speaker 8: it works in their favor, to not be informed voters
Speaker 8: because it works in their favor. So we can kind
Speaker 8: of see that same parallel, and that's one of the
Speaker 8: things that you know, I think John has made a
Speaker 8: great way of highlighting that and has really essentially, you know,
Speaker 8: paved the way for making that information known as well
Speaker 8: as Zenya Zenia is. Can I say this, she's a
Speaker 8: full badass because she she her and John, like I
Speaker 8: have to say, like, they are so on it of
Speaker 8: getting that information out, and it's extremely important because we
Speaker 8: want our nurses to be informed, we want all of
Speaker 8: us to be informed.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So on that note, when is the election and
Speaker 4: if you're in the Union, how do you vote?
Speaker 7: Ballots go out April fifth, we have to have you
Speaker 7: have to have your ballot in Oakland in the office
Speaker 7: by May. We're telling people May seventeenth, because they're going
Speaker 7: to be counted the morning of May eighteenth. You will
Speaker 7: get if you are a member, a duce paying member
Speaker 7: in good standing, you will get a ballot in the mail.
Speaker 7: But we are also telling people because we are finding
Speaker 7: that there's kind of like two lists of people, you know,
Speaker 7: in particularly our VA nurses. VA nurses are telling us
Speaker 7: that they have not been getting bad they didn't get
Speaker 7: ballots last election, and so we're encouraging everyone to send
Speaker 7: emails to the election officers to get a ballot if
Speaker 7: you haven't gotten one, to make sure that those lists.
Speaker 7: There's a list of people paying dues and they faithfully
Speaker 7: take your dues out of your out of your check,
Speaker 7: and then there's a list of people who receive ballots.
Speaker 7: You know, definitely very normal and cool, the sort of
Speaker 7: thing that we expect from any sort of union, that is,
Speaker 7: you know, buying for the nurses. And so we have
Speaker 7: an election email. Can I does anyone have that off
Speaker 7: top of their heads? I will pull it up real
Speaker 7: quick as we were talking.
Speaker 4: That's fine, we'll just we'll just show notes.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, it will be in the description.
Speaker 9: And in the meantime, you know, people can go to
Speaker 9: our website. We have a website where you can read
Speaker 9: about our story, our philosophy, our platform, you know, all
Speaker 9: the things that people should know and how to request
Speaker 9: the ballot and how to email the union and everything.
Speaker 9: The address is shift change and you one word dot org.
Speaker 4: Awesome. Yeah, thank you, thank you three so much for
Speaker 4: coming on the show. And hope, hope you beat them.
Speaker 7: I'm looking forward to us having a vigor where we can.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm excited.
Speaker 6: Thank you, thank you for having us think you appreciate it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and the cerpanicett appened here you too, also listen,
Speaker 4: dear listener, can go make trouble for your bosses, your
Speaker 4: political leaders and people in your union if they're not
Speaker 4: doing what you wanted to do.
Speaker 9: Hell yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 10: Hello, and welcome to it could happen here. A podcast
Speaker 10: about things falling apart and how we try to put
Speaker 10: things back together again. It's sort of the Humpty Dumpty
Speaker 10: of podcasts. And of course, all the King's horses and
Speaker 10: all the kings men can't put us back together again
Speaker 10: because the attendance of power will never solve our problems
Speaker 10: for us. It's up to us to collectively solve our
Speaker 10: own problems. I'm your guest host with all the dramatic metaphors,
Speaker 10: Margaret Gildoy. Today it's one of those things falling apart episodes.
Speaker 10: Today we're going to be talking about the Kinsey Institute
Speaker 10: for Research and Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, a research institute
Speaker 10: in Bloomington, Indiana. Its mission is to quote foster and
Speaker 10: promote a greater understanding of human sexuality and relationships to research, outreach, education,
Speaker 10: and historical preservation. The Kinsey Institute in many ways is
Speaker 10: just a sexual research center. It's the sexual research Center.
Speaker 10: We're going to be talking to Dev Montonez, who last
Speaker 10: week gave me a tour of the center. But first
Speaker 10: being me, I want to give you all context. I'm
Speaker 10: going to talk about history. I'm going to talk about
Speaker 10: a different institute for sexual research called well, the Institute
Speaker 10: for Sexual Research, except it was in Berlin from nineteen
Speaker 10: nineteen to nineteen thirty three, so they called it the
Speaker 10: Institute for Sexual Wiston Shaft History sometimes remembers it as
Speaker 10: Hirschfeld's Institute after Magnus Hirschfeld, the director of it. For
Speaker 10: fourteen years, the institute researched human sexuality. They offered consulting
Speaker 10: on matters of sex to straight and gay people. They
Speaker 10: pioneered a ton of transsexual medical practices, including pushing for
Speaker 10: the shocking at the time idea that trans people are
Speaker 10: happier if we're just allowed to socially transition and live
Speaker 10: as our preferred gender, which they observed led to a
Speaker 10: dramatic drop in suicide rates. This is medical practice that
Speaker 10: has continued, and we have more and more research about
Speaker 10: that to this day. The institute coined the terms transvestite
Speaker 10: and transsexual. They performed the first gender confirmation surgery in
Speaker 10: known history on a woman named Dora Richter in nineteen thirty.
Speaker 10: They worked alongside pro homosexual advocacy groups. Germany led the
Speaker 10: Western world in acceptance of LGBT folks in the nineteen
Speaker 10: twenties and early nineteen thirties. It was founded by three
Speaker 10: Jewish researchers, the most famous of whom is the director,
Speaker 10: Magnus Hirschfeld. The institute itself, however, is famous today for
Speaker 10: one thing. Imagine a picture of a book burning. The
Speaker 10: first picture that comes to your mind is probably black
Speaker 10: and white, and it's of Nazis. This photo is used
Speaker 10: any time someone wants to say something like the are
Speaker 10: bad they burned books. What usually goes on said when
Speaker 10: this photo is reproduced is what books those Nazis were burning.
Speaker 10: They were burning the institute on May sixth, nineteen thirty three,
Speaker 10: Nazis burned around twenty thousand books, destroying endless amounts of
Speaker 10: research into homosexuality, transsexuality, and cross dressing. Joseph Goebbels, the
Speaker 10: chief propagandist of the Nazis, was present. He gave a
Speaker 10: speech to forty thousand people during that book burning, so
Speaker 10: ended the Institute for Sexual Research. The first trans woman
Speaker 10: to undergo gender confirmation surgery, Dora Richter. She was either
Speaker 10: killed in this attack or she was arrested and died
Speaker 10: in prison shortly thereafter. Her exact fate is unknown. Magnus
Speaker 10: himself was out of the country at the time, and
Speaker 10: he never returned. He died in exile in France. This,
Speaker 10: I believe, is the context we need to hold onto
Speaker 10: when we talk about the Kinsey Institute, when we talk
Speaker 10: about what they're facing today, as we watch people running
Speaker 10: for office in this country. Wielding flamethrowers to burn books
Speaker 10: and campaign ads, while librarians face criminal penalties for making
Speaker 10: books available to students. Eventually, the Nazis were defeated, of course,
Speaker 10: they were defeated through force of arms, after great loss
Speaker 10: of life and a coming together of ideological enemies like
Speaker 10: capitalists and authoritarian communists. Shortly thereafter, in nineteen forty seven,
Speaker 10: a bisexual, polyamorous sexologist named Alfred Charles Kinsey founded his
Speaker 10: own Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana,
Speaker 10: seventy seven years ago for those keeping track. Thereafter, he
Speaker 10: produced work that's foundational to modern sexology. Most famous today
Speaker 10: is the Kinsey Scale, which broke homosexuality and heterosexuality out
Speaker 10: of a binary. Maybe the most famous at the time
Speaker 10: of his work, though, was his nineteen forty eight book
Speaker 10: Sexual Behavior and the Human in his later book Sexual
Speaker 10: Behavior in the Human Female, which are often called the
Speaker 10: Kinsey Reports, which offered groundbreaking analysis like it turns out
Speaker 10: women and joy sex also, and also that thirty seven
Speaker 10: percent of men had had quote overt homosexual experience to orgasm,
Speaker 10: which shocked the hell out of the world. Well, it
Speaker 10: probably shocked about sixty seven percent of the world. Since then,
Speaker 10: the Kinsey Institute has been one of the premier sexology
Speaker 10: research institutes and archives in the world, and now in
Speaker 10: the twenty twenties, it finds itself at the center of
Speaker 10: a culture war and conservative backlash. For decades, the right
Speaker 10: wing has tried and failed to find evidence that Kinsey
Speaker 10: himself was a pedophile. Last February, the Republican government of
Speaker 10: Indiana voted for House Bill one thousand and one, which
Speaker 10: bars state money from funding the institute. To tell us
Speaker 10: what's happened with that, what the future of the institute
Speaker 10: it is likely to be, and how all this ties
Speaker 10: into the culture wars that we're living through Right now,
Speaker 10: we have Dev Montanez, the ADMIN coordinator of the institute
Speaker 10: and a student at Indiana University. Hi, Dev, Hey, thanks
Speaker 10: for listening to my long intro.
Speaker 5: It's good for me to know some of the history
Speaker 5: behind the place that I'm at forty hours a week.
Speaker 10: So could you introduce yourself about a little bit about
Speaker 10: the work that you do at the institute? And I
Speaker 10: don't know maybe what brought you there, but just yeah.
Speaker 5: So I started back in early twenty twenty two as
Speaker 5: kind of the person who was spearheading the seventy fifth
Speaker 5: anniversary celebrations that we were going to have. And I
Speaker 5: am lucky enough that I have a background in DIY
Speaker 5: punk and so my organization skills are largely from that
Speaker 5: and not from any type of institution. Somehow, those skills
Speaker 5: go over really well in academia. Okay, a few of
Speaker 5: my friends that are like postdocs and stuff that are
Speaker 5: now in you know, academic worlds, are like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 5: this has helped me. You know, running shows has really
Speaker 5: helped me run research projects.
Speaker 10: Oh yeah, because it's all about having your own initiative
Speaker 10: and working for people exactly and interesting.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's been. It's been great to see and kind
Speaker 5: of be in the middle of it.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I was originally at Rutgers and then I didn't finish
Speaker 5: my degree there, dropped out because of financial issues of course,
Speaker 5: as that's what happens when you're in college. Yeah, and
Speaker 5: I was in Bloomington for a long time, almost seven years,
Speaker 5: I want to say, before I started working here. And
Speaker 5: I started working here and I was like, well, I
Speaker 5: get like a little bit of tuition reimbursement for working here,
Speaker 5: I might as well finish it. So now I'm at
Speaker 5: the purpose of or at the standstill of my life
Speaker 5: where I am back in school and working full time. Yeah,
Speaker 5: mainly just to get it over.
Speaker 10: With, get working full time over with.
Speaker 5: Uh No, well I wish get the degree over with that.
Speaker 5: If I have the debt, I might as well have it.
Speaker 10: Yeah, so okay. So you work for the Kinsey Institute,
Speaker 10: and the Kinsey Institute is totally fine and on solid
Speaker 10: footing and is completely okay. So this is the thing
Speaker 10: that surprised me, you know, when I came and visited
Speaker 10: the Kinsey Institute and thank you for the tour of
Speaker 10: the institute. I the Kinsey Institute is such a institute,
Speaker 10: such a monolith, such a a thing that has existed
Speaker 10: for so long. It's hard for me to imagine people
Speaker 10: being really mad at it. Like it's it's hard for
Speaker 10: me to imagine that it's in trouble and it seems
Speaker 10: too big to fail. But like not too big, but
Speaker 10: too institutional, too important, Like I can't imagine someone saying, oh,
Speaker 10: we want to get rid of this incredibly important historical thing.
Speaker 10: I guess that's what a lot of the culture wars
Speaker 10: actually are about. So what's going on.
Speaker 5: Okay, So last summer it was like the budget vote
Speaker 5: I think for Indiana government, state government, and they someone
Speaker 5: Larisa Sweet is her name, the representative who proposed this,
Speaker 5: basically decided to say Kensing's too is perverts and you
Speaker 5: we shouldn't fund them with state money, which would you
Speaker 5: know under I guess understandable. But we're not funded by
Speaker 5: state money. Okay, only like a small person of the
Speaker 5: university as a whole is funded by state government money.
Speaker 5: So it's not quite like your tax dollars are paying
Speaker 5: for us to exist. We are able to utilize the
Speaker 5: services of the university, which is very helpful in the
Speaker 5: case of being If we were like a nonprofit, we'd
Speaker 5: probably have to do a lot of that work, like
Speaker 5: legwork in terms of like up keep of a building,
Speaker 5: like we'd have to do that on our own right.
Speaker 5: But the university, the state government, does not fund us.
Speaker 5: We're funded by donors. We're funded by grants that we
Speaker 5: receive and endowments that exist that other people have given
Speaker 5: us because they believe in the worst that we do
Speaker 5: and they want to see it continue.
Speaker 10: So why are they trying to go after the wrong
Speaker 10: source of your funding? And how does it end up
Speaker 10: impacting you like that they've pas asked to this, you know,
Speaker 10: essentially law to take money away from you that you
Speaker 10: weren't using.
Speaker 5: Yeah. So the big thing is that there is a
Speaker 5: lot of misinformation about Alfred Kinsey and his first book,
Speaker 5: The Human Behavior of This or sorry, The Sexual Behavior
Speaker 5: of the Human Male, And there is a table within
Speaker 5: it of doctor Kinzie. When he did his research, he
Speaker 5: interviewed people specifically to ask them, you know, when were
Speaker 5: you first, like first realizing your sexual arousal. And some
Speaker 5: people said, you know, I was this age, I was twelve,
Speaker 5: I was five. And as a child, you know that
Speaker 5: you play around with your body because you're learning it right,
Speaker 5: because you've never used most of these things before. It's
Speaker 5: brand new. And so he had years in their ag
Speaker 5: in there that were younger than anyone that is conservative
Speaker 5: would want to believe that you would be sexually.
Speaker 10: Aroused, right unless you're going to marry a heterosexually into
Speaker 10: a pastor Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 5: Yeah, child marriage is coming back. So there's that true. Yeah,
Speaker 5: So there's that that exists. It's a lot of people
Speaker 5: who don't understand the research that he does. Period, there
Speaker 5: was a lot of backlash when he had when he
Speaker 5: did his work because people didn't want to believe that
Speaker 5: anyone was having premarital sex, that anyone was homosexual and
Speaker 5: it was normal, or that anyone any woman enjoys sex,
Speaker 5: right because it's for one thing only, right.
Speaker 10: So they looked at this chart that said five year
Speaker 10: olds experienced sexual attraction and said he's interviewing five year olds?
Speaker 10: Is that.
Speaker 5: Basically, or rather that he was doing experiments on five
Speaker 5: year olds. His work is like physical because he is
Speaker 5: a zoologist, right, biologist by nature. And I'm going to
Speaker 5: guess they think that any research that you do has
Speaker 5: to be with a person in one room and not
Speaker 5: you know, social interviews or oral histographies, Like they don't
Speaker 5: put those two things together.
Speaker 10: Right, And I was reading that they have a lot
Speaker 10: of I was expecting when when I looked at this,
Speaker 10: I was expecting to find like op eds from the
Speaker 10: fifties or something, But I'm finding things from twenty twenty
Speaker 10: three of people throwing a fit about the fact that
Speaker 10: he during some of this he did like, I mean,
Speaker 10: he was kinky. It seemed like right, he like filmed
Speaker 10: himself fucking, and he filmed his wife fucking and he
Speaker 10: a bunch of consenting adults had some sex that he
Speaker 10: was around for, and that's like meant to mean that
Speaker 10: he is a horrible, weird monster.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and truly, none of my work has anything to
Speaker 5: do with or literally anyone's work has anything to do
Speaker 5: with what Kinsey might have done when she was here,
Speaker 5: because he died so like within eight years of the
Speaker 5: institute even being a thing.
Speaker 10: Yeah, so.
Speaker 5: I don't know, it's not important to the work that
Speaker 5: we do now, even if he was a kinky person,
Speaker 5: Like people that get into sex research are interested in sex,
Speaker 5: so he wanted to try stuff out. I guess ye, Like,
Speaker 5: who does it? That's like the point of being alive.
Speaker 10: No, no, actually, the point of being alive is buying
Speaker 10: goods and services from our advertisers. I don't know if
Speaker 10: you knew this. I think you thought it was about
Speaker 10: seeking joy, but it's actually about filling the gaping mall
Speaker 10: at the center of your life with products like these ones.
Speaker 10: And we're back, Okay. So obviously people have a problem
Speaker 10: with this man who's been dead since the fifties and
Speaker 10: therefore mad at this institute that keeps track of a
Speaker 10: lot of stuff over the years like an archive. What
Speaker 10: do they when they try to pull state funding from you?
Speaker 10: How does that impact you? You're saying that that's like
Speaker 10: not you know, does it primarily impact you because everyone's
Speaker 10: suddenly aware of and mad at you again, or does
Speaker 10: it actually also like is it going to cut your funding?
Speaker 10: Like what's happening.
Speaker 5: So what's happening is there's now a I don't want
Speaker 5: to say like a disagreement, but there's there's a there's
Speaker 5: people trying to figure out how to be compliant with
Speaker 5: this law, which means that they need to go into
Speaker 5: certain administrative burdens to prove that we don't get these fonts. Okay,
Speaker 5: that's really all that it is. Otherwise we are pretty
Speaker 5: good standing. It's it's more so at least now the
Speaker 5: Border Trustie's voted on Friday and they basically brought in
Speaker 5: the President's recommendation of do not separate us from the
Speaker 5: from the university, and so that happened on Friday, March
Speaker 5: first was the day that that went through. So we
Speaker 5: are all feeling pretty good. We all kind of had
Speaker 5: a little bit of a not so much a victory lap,
Speaker 5: but like a we've been hearing this for the last
Speaker 5: six months of worrying about what's going to happen to
Speaker 5: this place that we all love and that carries so
Speaker 5: many things because of the librarians who are around in
Speaker 5: the artifice, who are around, aren't the people handling the collection,
Speaker 5: And the legislature later decides, I you in a universe
Speaker 5: can't hold anything that is obscene, and obscene is you know,
Speaker 5: I have the beholder. It could easily mean that this,
Speaker 5: like six hundred thousand artifacts that we hold in our
Speaker 5: collections are gone, and we have stuff that spans two
Speaker 5: thousand years. It's not just items that are around today.
Speaker 5: And everything that we get is donated. We don't buy
Speaker 5: any of the items. Per second. People just mail them
Speaker 5: to us.
Speaker 10: The kind of things that normally if you mail to
Speaker 10: someone you might get in trouble.
Speaker 5: Yes, exactly, And that was kind of the people still
Speaker 5: think they're going to get in trouble kind of the point.
Speaker 5: Like I've heard that people have like shipped porn in
Speaker 5: cereal boxes as a way to like hide them because
Speaker 5: they're still worried that the comstock law is around in
Speaker 5: a way that will make these items be destroyed.
Speaker 10: Yeah, well, okay, oh, there's so many parts of this
Speaker 10: that I want to talk about. I actually thought about
Speaker 10: this because I mailed a book from the Kinsey Institute
Speaker 10: to someone last week, and as I was packaging it up,
Speaker 10: I was thinking to myself, this used to be a crime.
Speaker 10: The Comstock laws. For anyone who's curious, there was this
Speaker 10: historical pervert named Comstock, And by that I mean he
Speaker 10: was the largest collector of porn of his era who
Speaker 10: was on a wild crusade against perversion and birth control
Speaker 10: and all of these things. And he went around and
Speaker 10: stopped people. He got all these laws passed that he
Speaker 10: can't pass pornographic materials through the US male That was
Speaker 10: like his big contribution to society, besides ruining an awful
Speaker 10: lot of people's lives. And that's coming up again, like
Speaker 10: the ghost of the Comstock Laws. Do you want to
Speaker 10: talk about that?
Speaker 5: Yeah, So we have a book. Bands happening within libraries.
Speaker 5: I honestly am not positive what is happening within Indiana libraries.
Speaker 5: But there is a group of I would say parent groups,
Speaker 5: but I don't even know that they're actually still parents
Speaker 5: of children. It's usually like women in their mid fifties
Speaker 5: and later who are running for superintendent or the school
Speaker 5: board whatever, and now coming up with these ways that
Speaker 5: children can't interact with items that maybe have never been
Speaker 5: illegal in the past, so to speak. Like if any
Speaker 5: book mentions sex of any kind, right, it can't be around.
Speaker 5: If anyone is homosexual in any of the books, it's
Speaker 5: banned in their eyes. Yeah, and you know a majority
Speaker 5: of our books are a lot of those things.
Speaker 10: I'm sure there's some straight stuff in there if you
Speaker 10: look really hard.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 5: I today I was in the reading room that we
Speaker 5: have and we had out the It was called the
Speaker 5: like Wild Edibles of the Eastern North America, and it
Speaker 5: was a book written by Alfred Kinsey because he was
Speaker 5: a he was like an eagle scout, Yeah, like loved nature.
Speaker 10: He was one of the first Eagle Scouts.
Speaker 5: Actually, yeah, you know more about them than I too.
Speaker 10: I just read about him in order to prepare this introduction.
Speaker 5: But a lot of those groups, like Moms for Liberty,
Speaker 5: they're the ones who are like a big crusade right now.
Speaker 5: When I first started, we just got a statue installed
Speaker 5: behind our building of Alfred Kinsey, And that is kind
Speaker 5: of when the majority of the threats that we would
Speaker 5: get started Okay, when they start talking about this statue.
Speaker 5: I have talked to people that have worked for like
Speaker 5: twenty years and they have said they've never seen threats
Speaker 5: come in like this ever before. Yeah, so it's people
Speaker 5: talking about like bombing the statue. I calls about you know,
Speaker 5: being a sexual predator, a debiant, or you know, you
Speaker 5: guys should all die, and it's very directed at us, right,
Speaker 5: It's it's less of being directed at like a random
Speaker 5: abstract thing.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: We have gotten a lot of harassment in terms of
Speaker 5: like people who because they think, oh, you do sex research,
Speaker 5: so you want to picture of my dick?
Speaker 10: So interesting.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so that will happen at times.
Speaker 10: You all should do an exhibit of the dick pics
Speaker 10: that have been donated so kindly to your institution and
Speaker 10: the individuals who work for it are are a ratiing
Speaker 10: system underneath.
Speaker 5: I'm sure a curator, a compassman will love that. We
Speaker 5: actually just got in donated to us was the Cynthia
Speaker 5: plaster Casters her dick molds that she did of the
Speaker 5: in the eighties. She's like a famous groupie, okay, like
Speaker 5: rock stars, So we have like Jimmy Hendrick's keenis whoa,
Speaker 5: you know, bronze mold and that's the next big exhibition
Speaker 5: that's supposed to happen. But we also have like Jello biafra.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 5: Okay, it's hilarious.
Speaker 10: Would you all get never mind? I was thinking about
Speaker 10: how you all can make some money.
Speaker 5: Lots of people are the gay of that.
Speaker 10: Yeah, okay, huh, well no, it's okay. So it's so
Speaker 10: interesting to me, right, because it seems like their attempt
Speaker 10: to shut you down legislatively was a swing and a miss.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 10: It was this thing that they they thought that they
Speaker 10: had this thing that they're like, Haha, We're going to
Speaker 10: get those perverts by cutting off their funding. And then
Speaker 10: everyone was like, well, that's not where the funding comes from.
Speaker 10: And the university was like, we kind of like this place.
Speaker 10: It's been around for seventy seven years. It's literally the
Speaker 10: only reason anyone outside of Indiana has ever heard of us. Yeah,
Speaker 10: is that kind.
Speaker 5: Of a that's definitely the vibe. We had like a
Speaker 5: series of listening sessions with the higher administration of like
Speaker 5: the public, well the university public coming in and just
Speaker 5: basically a lot of them saying the Kinzians too, is
Speaker 5: the only reason why I came to ium. The fact
Speaker 5: that this is here allows me to do my research,
Speaker 5: even if their research is in like Eastern European you know,
Speaker 5: like faberge eggs. Right, So it gives people a chance
Speaker 5: to see that like academic freedom and like freedom to
Speaker 5: research what you want is possible, and not just possible,
Speaker 5: but like encouraged. Right, Like, as an R one university,
Speaker 5: we should be doing should be researching things that aren't
Speaker 5: or taboo at times, yeah, and are actually trying to
Speaker 5: help the world rather than making money for some investor somewhere.
Speaker 10: Right, No, because that seems like the entire point of academia, right. Academia. Okay,
Speaker 10: this is really interesting to me because I have kind
Speaker 10: of a bit of a love hate relationship with academia,
Speaker 10: and you know, there's a lot of critiques that can
Speaker 10: be laid at sort of Ivory tower and locking away
Speaker 10: information and things. But yet as we enter this sort
Speaker 10: of anti intellectual time that is absolutely a right wing
Speaker 10: culture war thing is to be anti intellectual and in
Speaker 10: this case specifically shut down the academy's ability to preserve
Speaker 10: and transfer knowledge.
Speaker 5: Like.
Speaker 10: The problem from my point of view is that when
Speaker 10: there are limits to how well the information can be transferred,
Speaker 10: rather than the right wing anti intellectualism. Well, I anti
Speaker 10: intellectualism broadly. I'm not trying to make a case for
Speaker 10: any other kind of It is a problem with the
Speaker 10: actual existence of this knowledge, right, It's this like forbidden
Speaker 10: knowledge that no one should know that thirty seven percent
Speaker 10: of men in the nineteen forties like got a handy,
Speaker 10: you know exactly.
Speaker 5: The weird thing is that our collections are literally open
Speaker 5: to anyone who wants to come. We don't need to
Speaker 5: test it in any way. Well, yeah, that happens often,
Speaker 5: which to me is great and is kind of hard
Speaker 5: to come across in any archive. Usually if you have
Speaker 5: an archive, like you need to have an affiliation with
Speaker 5: a university or a company in order to come and
Speaker 5: look at some of these things.
Speaker 10: Yeah, you know.
Speaker 5: I mean that's not to say that like anyone comes
Speaker 5: in and they are doing lude things like there we
Speaker 5: talk with everyone that comes in. There's no mystery happening.
Speaker 5: Really okay, there's no sex dungeon. I was a little
Speaker 5: I think, Yeah, it's really boring. It's just a beige
Speaker 5: hallway for the most part.
Speaker 10: But you know what isn't boring that I have to
Speaker 10: interject quickly, is supporting by like I'm never bored while
Speaker 10: I'm in the process of exchanging little pictures of dead
Speaker 10: people for products and services like the ones that support
Speaker 10: this podcast. And we're back. And I feel really guilty
Speaker 10: for literally cutting you off mid sentence in order to
Speaker 10: do that. I'm so sorry.
Speaker 5: It's weird to be on the other side of this
Speaker 5: to actually see do that. Yeah, one of the big
Speaker 5: things that happened when I first started was Bloomington has
Speaker 5: a big pride. Bloomington as a whole is what they
Speaker 5: call like a blue pocket and the rest of the
Speaker 5: red the sea of red of Indiana. But I've also
Speaker 5: heard people say, like, you know, like Indiana went to
Speaker 5: Obama in two thousand and eight, like it's not as
Speaker 5: red as people really think it is. Right, It's that
Speaker 5: like it just came out today that we're like the
Speaker 5: fiftieth in voter turnout.
Speaker 10: WHOA, that's bad.
Speaker 4: That's really sad.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but people are so disheartened, Like it feels it's
Speaker 5: really hard when these people are yelling about how conservative
Speaker 5: Indiana is constantly that it gets in everyone's head that, oh,
Speaker 5: it doesn't matter that what I do, which I have
Speaker 5: a love hate Yeah, I have a love hate relationship
Speaker 5: with voting. But I also understand that, like I kind
Speaker 5: of need to in this capacity of where I am
Speaker 5: right because it really can change on a dime. Right.
Speaker 5: I think my my personal representative, he was elected by
Speaker 5: like eleven votes and he is a horrible, horrible man.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I when I get his fucking mailers that
Speaker 5: just say some dumb shit about trans laws, and I
Speaker 5: just go, I can't with this.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I get pissed because the cowboy hat and his mailers. No,
Speaker 10: but heah, okay, yeah that makes sense. There's no cowboys
Speaker 10: where I live. It's the mountains. Take off the cowboy
Speaker 10: hat and put on a real tree baseball cap like
Speaker 10: everyone else in this town. Poser, Okay, sorry anyway, h huh.
Speaker 5: So a lot of what's going on is that people
Speaker 5: think that Indiana is super right wing, and as someone
Speaker 5: who's who came here from the East Coast, like I
Speaker 5: love it here, Like it's really beautiful in Indiana. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I like not being around a lot of people. Bloomington
Speaker 5: says that there it's a really small town, but it
Speaker 5: really is like eighty thousand people. When the students aren't here,
Speaker 5: which is still to me a lot of people. Yeah,
Speaker 5: but it is small comparatively to anywhere on the East Coast, right,
Speaker 5: But everyone I've met here, I will say, there's great
Speaker 5: organizers that live here. There's a great amount of community
Speaker 5: and just like building of coalitions between people that I
Speaker 5: haven't really seen elsewhere, Okay, which is really important. And
Speaker 5: it's not just through the university, which I think is
Speaker 5: most people think it's all here, But there's so many
Speaker 5: people outside of the university that do amazing work that
Speaker 5: maybe came here to go to school but ended up
Speaker 5: staying or just came here because this used to be
Speaker 5: like the folk punk capital.
Speaker 11: That's true.
Speaker 10: That is whatever. When I was going to Bloomington, that
Speaker 10: is what everyone asked. No one asked me about the
Speaker 10: Kinsey Institute. Everyone asked me about folk punk. Yeah, my
Speaker 10: interests align more to the Kinsey Institute.
Speaker 4: Person.
Speaker 10: No one get mad at me. Well, okay, so it's interesting.
Speaker 10: So in my mind, you're like, oh, okay, the right
Speaker 10: wing came for the Kinsians student and they just failed, right,
Speaker 10: And is that missing the fact that you had a
Speaker 10: lot of organizers and a lot of people working to
Speaker 10: defend the Kinsey Institute.
Speaker 5: I think so, I wouldn't even say that it was
Speaker 5: a failure. It was more of they really don't understand
Speaker 5: what we do and even how these institutions work. I
Speaker 5: think is the real thing is that they are so
Speaker 5: caught up in how things should work, they don't actually
Speaker 5: look into how like neoliberalism is everywhere and it is.
Speaker 5: I don't think they understand what that is and how
Speaker 5: much it's infected, how bureaucratic everything is, and how everything
Speaker 5: is interconnected constantly.
Speaker 10: So that's why they thought tax money would be the thing,
Speaker 10: but it's actually this complicated capitalist system.
Speaker 5: Yes, I mean maybe if they listen to some some
Speaker 5: other people and they're about capitalism, they would probably get more,
Speaker 5: you know, more people to come behind them. But for
Speaker 5: the most part, the folks who are are a loud
Speaker 5: and proud about that, they they don't know what we do.
Speaker 5: They don't know who we are either. They think they.
Speaker 10: Do good since they're trying to murder you.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the director got docked the first year I was here.
Speaker 5: That was fun and there was a protest with some
Speaker 5: three percenters on campus. And we work for closely with
Speaker 5: Blimington Pridle out of the time, and so there's always
Speaker 5: the worry of people showing up there. Yeah, but again,
Speaker 5: like I said, like everyone here is there's so many
Speaker 5: good organizers that they've kept this town safe for so long,
Speaker 5: and I think they'll continue to do that.
Speaker 10: That's cool. I like when we learn and when we
Speaker 10: reinforce the fact that the thing that keeps us safe
Speaker 10: is organizing and is like community organizing and getting people
Speaker 10: together to keep track of what's going on and counter it.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: One of the big things that we focus on in
Speaker 5: terms of like our research goals is well being and
Speaker 5: that's always something that has stuck with me because to me,
Speaker 5: the well being is us keeping each other safe. And
Speaker 5: I remember when this all first happened. I remember talking
Speaker 5: to the director and just being like, those people aren't
Speaker 5: going to help us. We are going to help each other.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: It's like, oh, yeah, you're right, we are. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 5: we're not. Like we kind of can't count on everyone
Speaker 5: else sometimes these big institutions, because we know what we're doing,
Speaker 5: but they maybe don't know what we're doing, and maybe
Speaker 5: it's time that we just tell more people about it.
Speaker 10: I like that. I also like that it specifically points
Speaker 10: out that they did right by hiring a diy punk
Speaker 10: into their institution.
Speaker 5: You know, I yeah, I get a lot of weird
Speaker 5: flat but not being an academic right, But then it
Speaker 5: comes to things like this and it's like, oh, I
Speaker 5: always hear like, well we made their choice, yeah, which
Speaker 5: it's nice to feel, unfortunately in a job.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 10: No, that makes some sense if people want to support
Speaker 10: you all as individuals who're facing this trouble, or the
Speaker 10: Kinsey Institute in general, or even just like if you
Speaker 10: have advice for people who are stuck engaging in the
Speaker 10: culture war more directly because they don't live on the coasts,
Speaker 10: what would you say? How can people support.
Speaker 5: To support each other? We have a nice queer sports
Speaker 5: league here and I suggest playing kickball with your friends.
Speaker 5: It's been really good, and also doing a honky talk night.
Speaker 5: That's our big, our big thing cool. I'm really proud
Speaker 5: of everyone that put has put that stuff together because
Speaker 5: it has created a world that has brings people from
Speaker 5: all different parts together of the town. YEA for the institute,
Speaker 5: if you want to go to Kinseyinstitute dot org, that
Speaker 5: is kind of where you can see everything. You can
Speaker 5: support us by coming and learning more about sexual research
Speaker 5: and your history, because it's all of our history in
Speaker 5: terms of learning about how people lived and how we
Speaker 5: have like the most mundane things. Yeah, you're talking about
Speaker 5: Hirschfeld earlier. We have a scrap book of his and
Speaker 5: that is like the oldest thing of his that it
Speaker 5: is like his personal item that we have, Yeah, along
Speaker 5: with like published items, but that's like the big thing.
Speaker 10: Yeah, he was almost fifty when he started the institute.
Speaker 10: I think I'm like kind of doing the math in
Speaker 10: my head really quickly because he was born in the
Speaker 10: nineteenth century. Yeah, okay, well, thank you so much for
Speaker 10: coming on and talking about this stuff. I'm so glad
Speaker 10: that this didn't you know, when we first talked about this,
Speaker 10: we didn't know which way the vote was going to go.
Speaker 10: I'm glad to do a little bit of a celebratory
Speaker 10: talk about this important institution. And yeah, thank you so much.
Speaker 5: Thank you.
Speaker 10: And if you want to fill hear me more, I
Speaker 10: have a different podcast, It's Cool People Did Cool Stuff
Speaker 10: and it's also on Cool Zone Media, which is the
Speaker 10: thing you're listening to right now. I hope you all
Speaker 10: are doing as well as you can with everything that's
Speaker 10: going on and putting each other back together again because
Speaker 10: we're all No. I'm not even going to close with
Speaker 10: a humpty dumpty metaphor. I'm just done.
Speaker 1: Welcome, take it up here.
Speaker 12: I'm addressage of the future channel and anddeurism and haven't digging.
Speaker 1: Into political culture.
Speaker 12: Drawn from the work of Dennis Tourist and Tim world
Speaker 12: Fourth in their book On the Edge Political Cults Left
Speaker 12: and Right. I've spoken before about the cult recruitment process,
Speaker 12: the contradictory positions held by cult members, ideological totalism, and
Speaker 12: the commonalities of political cults, including rigid belief systems, immunity
Speaker 12: to falsification, authoritarianism, arbitrary leadership, deification of leaders, intense activism,
Speaker 12: and the use of loaded language. If you want the
Speaker 12: details and all that, you can check out the first
Speaker 12: episode in the Political Cult series, or you can check
Speaker 12: out my video on the topic, or you can pick
Speaker 12: up the book on Political Cults yourself. As I said,
Speaker 12: on the Edge Political Cults left and Right previously, I've
Speaker 12: touched on the Laruche movement and the United Red Army
Speaker 12: of Japan. Today we'll be looking at another case study,
Speaker 12: this time of the various groups associated with Fred Neumann
Speaker 12: refused politics seamlessly with psychotherapy.
Speaker 1: Today, I'm joined by.
Speaker 4: Oh this is my cue. Oh no, I've been waiting
Speaker 4: for my queue and I've missed it. It's me a
Speaker 4: long misser of cues. Uh sometimes host of this podcast.
Speaker 4: I don't this guy's name sounds really familiar, but I
Speaker 4: cannot remember what he was up to, so I'm very excited.
Speaker 12: Yeah, yes, he has some interesting connections, very interesting connections.
Speaker 12: If people want to learn more about him, they can,
Speaker 12: of course pick up the book, or they can check
Speaker 12: out Terror, Love and Brainwashing, Attachments and Culton Tutalitarian Systems
Speaker 12: by Alexandra Stein.
Speaker 1: But anyway, let's get into it.
Speaker 12: Fred Newman was a Korean War veteran who earned a
Speaker 12: PhD in the philosophy of science from Stanford University with
Speaker 12: no formal training in psychology. Newman took a turn towards
Speaker 12: Maoism in the mid nineteen sixties, as one is apt
Speaker 12: to do in the mid nineteen sixties, in a time
Speaker 12: when the mantra the personal is political was coming into prominence.
Speaker 12: There was a greater interest in fusing personal development and
Speaker 12: political action. So that era, both the new psychotherapies cateringto
Speaker 12: a mass market that sought both happiness and social justice.
Speaker 12: Psychotherapy became something like a secular religion, which of course
Speaker 12: opened it up to Charlatan's who would propagate their innovative
Speaker 12: therapies and gain a following without actually testing or thought
Speaker 12: any scrutiny of the effectiveness of the ideas. Ieteen seventy,
Speaker 12: Newman assembled a small collective in Manhattan, sharing an apartment
Speaker 12: on the Upper West Side. By this time post By
Speaker 12: this time, post the collapse to the Students for a
Speaker 12: Democratic Society in the broader New Left, and coinciding with
Speaker 12: the fervor of the Cultural Revolution, people were looking for
Speaker 12: a new direction in a time when the psychotherapy bubble
Speaker 12: was growing. Newman, as another of those charismatic therapists, would
Speaker 12: attract a group of individuals who were yearning for hope.
Speaker 12: New One's collective was first named if dot dot dot then,
Speaker 12: and it was indeed a fusion of radical sixties politics
Speaker 12: and the New Age therapy of the seventies. Newman's concept
Speaker 12: of social therapy or crisis normalization, blurred the lines between
Speaker 12: therapy and political activities, and the group would give rise
Speaker 12: to the Centers for Change the CFC. By nineteen seventy three,
Speaker 12: which proudly identified itself as a Marx Leninist Maoist organization.
Speaker 1: The communal roots of Newman's.
Speaker 12: Group had cast a cult like aura from its inception.
Speaker 12: Core members were expected to leave their jobs, sell their possessions,
Speaker 12: and sustain themselves through activities like fundraising on street corners,
Speaker 12: while embracing shared living spaces within the group. Now buckle
Speaker 12: up for a bit of a crossover episode here, because
Speaker 12: from nineteen seventy three to nineteen seventy four Newman crossed
Speaker 12: paths with Lyndon LaRouche. Oh God, yes, of course he did,
Speaker 12: mind you. He links up with Laruche just after Laruche
Speaker 12: had completed Operation mop Up, so he was just attacking
Speaker 12: his enemies on the left and started shifting right wood
Speaker 12: if they use those terms, and Newman is like, yeah,
Speaker 12: this is my guy. This who I want to link
Speaker 12: up with. So their collaboration formed the United Front, comprising
Speaker 12: of Laruche's National Caucus of Labor Committees, the NCLC at
Speaker 12: Newman's Center for Change, and a third group led by
Speaker 12: Eugenio Parenti Ramos, which later transformed into the Communist Party
Speaker 12: USA Provisional, which I have to note, I have to
Speaker 12: know it is distinct from the Communist Party USA that
Speaker 12: most people know about.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think, I'm pretty sure there's another. I'm pretty
Speaker 4: sure it's also distinct from the Communist Party USA Revolutionary
Speaker 4: Committee and also the Communist Party USA Provisional Committee. I
Speaker 4: think those are if I'm remembering correctly, those are all
Speaker 4: separate organizations.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes they are.
Speaker 12: Yeah, Parentees group is actually connected with the National Labor
Speaker 12: fred Federation. So anyway, these joint forums were established and
Speaker 12: activities were coordinated among these groups. By nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 12: in fact, the Center for Change disbanded and Newman and
Speaker 12: his followers merged into the NCLC.
Speaker 1: Oh God, there was sort of a.
Speaker 12: Virgins between Larusha and Newman and their perspectives of leadership,
Speaker 12: contre formulation, and the manipulation of membership as Larusha's apocalypse,
Speaker 12: fair Moongarin and elitism would merge very well with Newman's
Speaker 12: use of psychotherapy. Of course, and you learn this quickly
Speaker 12: with cult leaders. They don't get along well for along
Speaker 12: with other cult leaders. So the fusion with Laruge led
Speaker 12: to inevitable clashes. While within the NCLC, the Newman group
Speaker 12: continued its operation, and tensions eventually reached a breaking point later.
Speaker 1: In August nineteen.
Speaker 12: Seventy four, Newman and his thirty eight followers left the
Speaker 12: NCLC to established the International Workers Party or IWP, which
Speaker 12: he declared was the vanguard of the work in class.
Speaker 4: Oh I love the seventies.
Speaker 12: Indeed, still you know Newman's association with Laruche had a
Speaker 12: big impact on his thinking and future developer. He aligned
Speaker 12: with a lot of Larusi's ideologies and was just as
Speaker 12: dismissive of various left movements. Even though they split, they
Speaker 12: still shared a disdain for common citizens, their group's members,
Speaker 12: and the principles of free society. Yet despite dismissing most
Speaker 12: left movements and saying that liberalism is fascism, Newman would
Speaker 12: occasionally dip his toes into democratic primaries infortiate existing leftist organizations,
Speaker 12: and utilized prominent black leaders to advance his own objectives.
Speaker 12: But I realize I haven't fully explained the focus of
Speaker 12: Newman's ideology. In most cases, cult leaders' ideologies ultimately hinge
Speaker 12: on follow me and the best, But you know they
Speaker 12: have their unique quirks here on there as well.
Speaker 1: Lucky for us.
Speaker 12: Newman published a book on his ideas the same year
Speaker 12: he parted with larushe in nineteen seventy four. So the
Speaker 12: book was called Power and Authority, and he basically cooked
Speaker 12: up a theory about the mind and society. They became
Speaker 12: the gospel for his cult and the ultimate manual for
Speaker 12: keeping his followers in check. According to Newman, revolution wasn't
Speaker 12: just about overthrowing the bourgeoisie. You also had to overthrow
Speaker 12: the bourgeoisie ego inside people's minds. So in a sense
Speaker 12: we cook in, you know, because you do have to
Speaker 12: sort of undo that brainwashing and you get.
Speaker 1: In a capitlict society.
Speaker 12: I mean, there's nothing wrong there necessarily, but you see,
Speaker 12: he was taking cues from Marx, Lenin and LaRouche, and
Speaker 12: his solution involved something called the proletarian psychotherapy, where the
Speaker 12: workers of the mind took down the rulers of the
Speaker 12: mind through therapy sessions that would attack.
Speaker 1: The bourgeois ego.
Speaker 12: Of course, he would be the one lead in the therapy,
Speaker 12: because you know, he hated Freudian and other psychotherapies as
Speaker 12: just boosting the bourgeois ego, and he especially hated that
Speaker 12: regular therapy is aimed to cut the emotional umbilical cord
Speaker 12: with the therapist and restore a healthy, independent ego, when
Speaker 12: his social therapy meant to build up a forever dependent
Speaker 12: proletarian ego that would only wither away when the proletarian
Speaker 12: stayed with us away. So basically never Newman's doctrines worked
Speaker 12: for his purposes, though his followers were stuck in this
Speaker 12: loop of dependency for over twenty five years. He had
Speaker 12: an additional component his control mechanisms, though. He developed a
Speaker 12: concept called friend or sexuality. So in his organizations, casual
Speaker 12: sexual relationships were arranged where a designated friend that you
Speaker 12: also had sex with monitored and critiqued individuals to maintain control.
Speaker 12: If pregnancies ever arose, they were usually told to get abortions.
Speaker 12: And as for new And himself, his inner circle was
Speaker 12: referred to as his haram or his wives, and they
Speaker 12: served as both trusted lieutenants in the administration and trusted
Speaker 12: lieutenants in the bedroom.
Speaker 1: If you dig, yes, ah, so yeah, now.
Speaker 12: Let's get into those segments that we can call Newman
Speaker 12: and the FBI sitting in the tree kissig. Because after
Speaker 12: the IWP was formed and briefly flirted with Marlene Dixon's
Speaker 12: Democratic Workers' Party, which was another cult. Newman ended up
Speaker 12: contacting the FBI. By the way, we are still in
Speaker 12: nineteen seventy four, very eventful year. So what happened was
Speaker 12: a guy named Jim Ratherford bailed on Newman's cult and
Speaker 12: took the child that was probably conceived in the cult
Speaker 12: with him. But you see, the child's mother and Green
Speaker 12: who stayed in the cult, and she wanted her child back.
Speaker 12: So Newman recruited two cult members that were also lawyers
Speaker 12: to get the FBI involved in fire and then Rutherford
Speaker 12: and the child. So they dialogued the FBI, set up
Speaker 12: a meet in between Green and the agents, and then
Speaker 12: Green spilled the tea that Rutherford used to roll with
Speaker 12: the Weather Underground and also had connection to the fugitive
Speaker 12: named Jane Albert. Fast forward to nineteen seventy six and
Speaker 12: Newman's IWP gets exposed by a splinter group for working
Speaker 12: with the FBI. But instead of denying it, Newman pins
Speaker 12: the blame on Anne Green and the two lawyers and
Speaker 12: basically pretends that they acted on their own without his direction,
Speaker 12: because obviously the mansoni looking off himself. So that was
Speaker 12: a fun of the side, right, well, collaboration with the FBI.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's like, if you're gonna be a snitch, at
Speaker 4: least have like, at least have the basic decency and
Speaker 4: self respect to admit that you were the snitch and
Speaker 4: not blameing on someone else.
Speaker 1: No, but a cult lead they would ever do that though.
Speaker 4: No terrible stuff.
Speaker 1: Carrying on chronologically.
Speaker 12: In nineteen seventy seven, Fred Newman shifted his focus to
Speaker 12: the political scene of New York City's Upper West Side
Speaker 12: and basically rebranded his group as the New York City
Speaker 12: Unemployed and Welfare Council. At this point, he abandoned the
Speaker 12: idea of an open vanguard formation and instead, while recruiting
Speaker 12: through therapy, gained political influence within other groups and formed
Speaker 12: broad and ill defined front organizations that could pursue the
Speaker 12: cult schools without too much heat on himself personally. Newman
Speaker 12: was actually able to get one of his cult members
Speaker 12: elected on the local school board, and that led to
Speaker 12: some liberals digging into Newman's background and group dynamics, where
Speaker 12: they found that indeed he was running a therapy cult
Speaker 12: where they relinquished jobs, severed political ties, and strendered all
Speaker 12: property and savings.
Speaker 1: The cult.
Speaker 12: Cut off from the outside world, busy with group activities
Speaker 12: and trapped in endless meetings, Numanites lacked feedback from reality,
Speaker 12: which kept them in line. So Newman's electoral victory in
Speaker 12: the form of the school board member of his own cult,
Speaker 12: gave him a taste a little for electoral activism. So
Speaker 12: when he crossed paths with Black nationalist Leonora Fulani, together
Speaker 12: they formed the New Alliance Party or NAP in nineteen
Speaker 12: seventy nine.
Speaker 1: I'll just call it the NAP, right.
Speaker 4: If I feel like we need to start like a
Speaker 4: party counter we're at like four five already.
Speaker 12: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I WP, THENAP yeah, Communist party professional yeah.
Speaker 12: Fulani ran for lieutenant governor of New York in nineteen
Speaker 12: eighty two and in nineteen eighty eight and ran for president,
Speaker 12: becoming the first black woman to do so, gain in
Speaker 12: ballot status in all fifty states and receive a nearly
Speaker 12: one million dollars in federal match funds. She ran again
Speaker 12: in nineteen ninety two and again qualified for ballot status
Speaker 12: in all fifty states, this time receiving two million dollars
Speaker 12: in federal matching funds, and she secured a whop in
Speaker 12: seventy three thousand, seven hundred and eight votes.
Speaker 4: That's always a depressing thing with these like the vanity
Speaker 4: electoral campaigns, is seeing how much money they spent getting
Speaker 4: like seven votes.
Speaker 12: Yeah, but I mean you'll never guess where this money
Speaker 12: was going.
Speaker 4: Oh no.
Speaker 12: In the background, new Ones financial maneuvers seem to be
Speaker 12: fundling a lot of the party's funds into other organizations
Speaker 12: affiliated with Newman. Lauren Redwood, Working Class Lesbian, actually shared
Speaker 12: her experiences working under the NAP in a letter to
Speaker 12: a Gain newspaper in San Francisco. I won't read the
Speaker 12: whole thing, but she basically talks about how she was
Speaker 12: excited to help a black woman run for president. She
Speaker 12: even found a lover while working on the campaign in Indiana,
Speaker 12: but quote, when it came time for NAP to leave Indiana,
Speaker 12: she I'm assuming the lover asked me to go with them,
Speaker 12: and I did. I was given forty eight hours to prepare.
Speaker 12: I quit my job, left my home, my friends put
Speaker 12: my belongings in storage, found a home for my pet,
Speaker 12: and gave the use of my car to NAP for
Speaker 12: in exchange for their take and over the pay months
Speaker 12: as a working class lesbian. I thought I had finally
Speaker 12: found a political movement which included me. What I found
Speaker 12: instead was an oppressive, disempowered, and misogynistic organization. All my
Speaker 12: decisions were made for me by someone else. I was
Speaker 12: told where to go and who to go with. I
Speaker 12: worked seven days a week, sixteen to twenty hours a day.
Speaker 12: I had two days off in two and a half months.
Speaker 12: There was an incredible urgency which overrode any personal needs
Speaker 12: or considerations, an urgency that meant complete self sacrifice. I
Speaker 12: felt totally powerless over my life, forced into a very
Speaker 12: submissive role where all control of my life belonged to
Speaker 12: someone else. I had given up everything for the campaign,
Speaker 12: my job, my home, and my support system. I felt desperate,
Speaker 12: and later in the letter she said that I was
Speaker 12: completely exhausted, so tired, I was unable to work well.
Speaker 12: Being unable to work, I had no income as I
Speaker 12: was expected to raise my salary myself in addition to
Speaker 12: raising money for the campaign. And she also spoke about
Speaker 12: losing herself and this social therapy thing that Newman was
Speaker 12: doing as a lot of independent thought was discouraged. This
Speaker 12: was Newman's whole emo, you know, manipulating individual distress to
Speaker 12: transform members into political activists under total control, replacing the
Speaker 12: traditional support structures that people would have been coming from
Speaker 12: with the cult as a new family. And despite some
Speaker 12: claims of dissolution, the evidence suggested that the International Workers'
Speaker 12: Party continued to exist even as the NAP was in existence,
Speaker 12: as members divested assets and funding towards the ideo BE
Speaker 12: the whole time. Now, it's quite interesting to learn the
Speaker 12: justification for why Newman picked Leonora Fulani in particular, and
Speaker 12: then would also link up later with some of the
Speaker 12: people that I'm about to talk about. So you're familiar
Speaker 12: with Antonio Gramsci right, Yeah. He introduced the concept of
Speaker 12: the organic intellectual, suggesting that each social class naturally produces
Speaker 12: a stratum capable of projecting its historic mission and a
Speaker 12: Germany on the flip side, Lenin in his What Is
Speaker 12: to Be Done Manifesto, envisioned a vanguard of professional revolutionaries
Speaker 12: from the intellectual elite to bring socialism to the working class.
Speaker 12: Newman was influenced by both concepts and considered his core
Speaker 12: group to be a vanguard mainly composed of white, middle
Speaker 12: class traditional intellectuals, often working as therapists for Newmanite fronts.
Speaker 12: But here's the twist. He borrowed gram Shee's organic leader's
Speaker 12: term and connected with people of color that had organic
Speaker 12: basis of support in their communities and would use them
Speaker 12: to advance the interests of his secretive white.
Speaker 4: Vanguard ah the PSL.
Speaker 12: Indeed, so that's why Newman would create his own version
Speaker 12: of the Rainbow Coalition with his Rainbow Assembly and also
Speaker 12: would engage with people like Lewis.
Speaker 1: Farkhan, Al Sharpton and else.
Speaker 12: Yeah, however, and political incoherence goes BurrH, he'd also link
Speaker 12: up with vague populist movements like Ross Puro's Reform Party,
Speaker 12: who he'd work to register voters for, and in an
Speaker 12: effort to gain more voters for the right winger Ross
Speaker 12: Pero's Reform Party, Newman and Fulani would encourage the Patriotic
Speaker 12: Party at the Independence Party of New York to link
Speaker 12: up with Peru, and then in nineteen ninety nine, the
Speaker 12: Newmanites threw their support behind the Paleo conservative pat Buchanans
Speaker 12: presidential campaign. So, in addition to his political activity, is
Speaker 12: Fred Newman wore many hats. He considered himself a playwright
Speaker 12: and staled as the artistic director of the Castillo Theater.
Speaker 12: He also directed train in at the east Side Institute
Speaker 12: for Short Term Psychotherapy, authored books featured at the Castillo Bookstore,
Speaker 12: and operated social therapy centers in various cities, describing them
Speaker 12: as a unique development community. Despite the deprivations imposed on
Speaker 12: his followers, as they can imagine, Newman lived quite comfortably.
Speaker 12: In nineteen ninety three, he bought a substantial Greenwich Village
Speaker 12: brownstone for nearly a million dollars. I mean, who says
Speaker 12: a cult of revolution and therapy kabi profits, right?
Speaker 4: I keep I keep thinking about that. Oh God, I
Speaker 4: forget which of the the Nepali maoist parties it was,
Speaker 4: but one of one of one of the guys who
Speaker 4: was the head of one of the Nepalese MAOIs parties
Speaker 4: who'd been like fighting a guerrilla war for a long time.
Speaker 4: The end of it was, he moved into the house
Speaker 4: of the guy, the mansion of the guy who'd been
Speaker 4: like Nepal's chief security minister.
Speaker 1: That's wild.
Speaker 4: It's a revolution because it goes in a circle and
Speaker 4: you end up right back where you were.
Speaker 12: I don't remember that one. That's a that's a good quote. Yeah,
Speaker 12: a lot of these organizations like bleazanty cults.
Speaker 1: But of course.
Speaker 12: Newmann, Fulani and others would always deny that they were
Speaker 12: in a cult.
Speaker 1: Cults always do.
Speaker 12: So you look at the evidence, and the evidence points
Speaker 12: to cult.
Speaker 4: Yeah, my, my, my, not a cult. T shirts raising
Speaker 4: a a lot of questions that are answered by the
Speaker 4: the T shirt.
Speaker 12: Yeah yeah, I love how when I first introduced my
Speaker 12: organization after apply disclaimers were actually not a cult, you know,
Speaker 12: like that one meme from King of the Hill.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 12: So, one critic of Newman wrote an article called Inside
Speaker 12: the New Alliance Party Dennis Surratt, and despite initially thinking
Speaker 12: that the NAP was a progressive organization, he ended up
Speaker 12: detailing psychological control, racism, sexism, and the use of millions
Speaker 12: of dollars to manipulate well made individuals, particularly target in
Speaker 12: the black community. The internal structure was of course hierarchical,
Speaker 12: as Newman lived luxuriously while the rank and file members
Speaker 12: worked to long hours and even faced mandatory taxes to
Speaker 12: support new One's seaside mansion.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 12: Numan's political positions were opportunistic. Obviously, they changed based on
Speaker 12: the perceived benefits to him and his attacks on individuals.
Speaker 12: Organizations were ruthless when they failed to support him. When
Speaker 12: members joined, whether through politics or therapy, they were required
Speaker 12: to reveal all their resources and turn them over to
Speaker 12: the organization. They had to go through mandatory psychotherapy sessions,
Speaker 12: which served as a method to recruit vulnerable individuals, exploit
Speaker 12: their weaknesses, and control their behavior.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 12: In another article, Marina Ortiz, who was a former leader
Speaker 12: in the New Alliance Party, explained why she resigned from
Speaker 12: the NAP. What happened was the leadership told her to
Speaker 12: put a child in foster care. I assume because the
Speaker 12: child and her child care was getting in the way
Speaker 12: of her full dedication to the cause. So she revealed
Speaker 12: the NAP did not live up to claims of promoting
Speaker 12: democracy obviously, and would use manipulative tactics and obstruct minority empowerment,
Speaker 12: and had a long history of attacking progressives and embracing
Speaker 12: Pero's nineteen ninety two presidential bid and the harsh streatment
Speaker 12: dissent in voices. In the end, in the book On
Speaker 12: the Edge, Denis Tursi and Tim Wreforth end up termining
Speaker 12: Newman's work new age Leninism, which I think is a
Speaker 12: really good phrase to use to describe what he was doing.
Speaker 12: He had a strong knack for manipulating politics.
Speaker 1: And even with.
Speaker 12: Newman dead and gone, the Newmanites have already proved themselves
Speaker 12: skilled political operatives, regardless of their actual size. So the
Speaker 12: potential for someone to fill his role in the future
Speaker 12: definitely remains, especially given the state of US politics.
Speaker 1: If you want to learn.
Speaker 12: More, like I said, definitely read on the Edge and
Speaker 12: also check the article how Totalism Works by Alexandra Stein,
Speaker 12: who was a survivor of a different cult who ended
Speaker 12: up doing a dissertation on New One. As for final words,
Speaker 12: stay away from cults base if it has Democratic Workers
Speaker 12: Party or People's Party of such and such or popular support,
Speaker 12: m scrutinize it a little bit, you know. Look, it's
Speaker 12: like at the structure, that's like what they're asking you
Speaker 12: to do, especially if the leadership considers themselves a vanguard
Speaker 12: despite having like.
Speaker 1: Fifteen members.
Speaker 12: Honestly, you probably shouldn't follow a group of any size
Speaker 12: that considers itself a vanguard.
Speaker 1: But that's.
Speaker 12: Typical for something for someone like me to putform. That's
Speaker 12: that's all I have to say on New One. Check
Speaker 12: on your friend with sexuals. They're probably going through it
Speaker 12: right now. We'll power to all the people.
Speaker 4: Peace, Welcome to it could happen here a podcast coming
Speaker 4: to you from a country rule by nine unelected dipshits
Speaker 4: and hideous costumes. You can at a whim destroy your life.
Speaker 4: I'm your host. Be along with me as Jim stout.
Speaker 11: Hi, I'm excited to hear about the Supreme Council or
Speaker 11: whatever they called. It's like the Jedi Council.
Speaker 4: God, It's it's a problematic comparison in a lot of ways,
Speaker 4: but like the thing I immediately think of is the
Speaker 4: extent is like like Iran, Like I don't like and
Speaker 4: you're not like Ran, right, but Iran gets so much
Speaker 4: shit for having the Surer Council. Right, this is like
Speaker 4: this council that's above their parliament, above their president, and
Speaker 4: it can make a bunch of decisions as a bunch
Speaker 4: of power. It's like, we also have a s Sure
Speaker 4: a Council, except instead of protecting the Islamic Revolution, it's
Speaker 4: designed to protect like the ideology of a bunch of
Speaker 4: right wingers from Harvard And it's.
Speaker 11: Like, well this is great for sure, Like yes, yeah,
Speaker 11: we we have a group of unelected, half dead people
Speaker 11: whose entire thing is to protect like capital and specifically
Speaker 11: the theft of land from indigenous peoples. That the thing
Speaker 11: that that they love to do.
Speaker 4: And again to defend a round here, like we did
Speaker 4: this first, Like this is like.
Speaker 11: That one won't get ever clipped out and used in
Speaker 11: other context. That's great. We kind of pioted this right
Speaker 11: like we were we were trying to trying to like
Speaker 11: take the give monarchism a soft landing, you know, So
Speaker 11: we we had some other unelected half dead people.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and this has the results of this have been
Speaker 4: disastrous and are widely regarded by everyone as a disaster.
Speaker 4: So we're gonna be talking about a few cases that
Speaker 4: Supreme Court is going to do, and also we're going
Speaker 4: to be talking about the street record and how it
Speaker 4: relates to sort of liberal what I guess I would
Speaker 4: call sort of liberal NGO, a sort of progressive NGO
Speaker 4: political and legal strategy, because all of that stuff needs
Speaker 4: to be thrown out the window immediately and it hasn't been. Yeah,
Speaker 4: So all right, let's just start with Texas Bill four,
Speaker 4: a very basically just like a turbo fascism bill that
Speaker 4: lets Texas police racially profile someone and go, I think
Speaker 4: this person's here legally and immediately arrest them.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 11: Crucially, it's it's I think.
Speaker 4: Right, like yeah, so it's like again we are giving
Speaker 4: the Texas police, like the heroes who ran away from Uvaldi,
Speaker 4: we are giving them the power to go, this person
Speaker 4: isn't white, I think they're here legally, I can arrest them.
Speaker 4: And then if they do arrest someone who's undocumented. There's
Speaker 4: the basically the way it works. It so it's it's
Speaker 4: it's it sets up a series of like criminal penalties
Speaker 4: like prison time. I think if you repeat offender, you
Speaker 4: get a felony. But mostly what it does is it
Speaker 4: less a judge immediately just support them.
Speaker 9: Now.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is, to use a technical term, obviously insanely illegal,
Speaker 4: like constitutionally like it is. The Constitution is very clear
Speaker 4: that that immigration is is, you know, constitutionally the purview
Speaker 4: of the federal government. It's very funny reading like Scotus
Speaker 4: Blog because people have to sort of pretend that like
Speaker 4: people are making real legal arguments here.
Speaker 11: Yeah, it's like when when Donald Trump is ever like
Speaker 11: we're we're looking at Donald Trump's policies next week spoiler alert.
Speaker 11: But like I've been writing about his proposed immigration policies
Speaker 11: and you have to be like, no, this shit's just
Speaker 11: fucking it's not legal. It's just not like, yeah, some
Speaker 11: crackpot old dude who thinks the fringe is on the
Speaker 11: flag mean that you're under abraltry law. That he's got
Speaker 11: a fucking argument, but he's wrong, Like this is ready
Speaker 11: to illegal shit.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And so so this bill was supposed to go into effect.
Speaker 4: There there's a whole series of very convoluted court battles
Speaker 4: over it, and this real court was just like, yeah,
Speaker 4: this can go into effect and until basically until the
Speaker 4: case goes on, and then eventually it eventually didn't go
Speaker 4: into effect because another another federal court was like, obviously
Speaker 4: this is insane. We can't let this go into effect.
Speaker 4: What the fuck are you guys talking about? And like
Speaker 4: this this bill the legal justification for this, he's batshit.
Speaker 4: It's so okay. They're trying to invoke the state war clause,
Speaker 4: which is this is this really like old timey law? Okay.
Speaker 4: So the thing the thing about like the seventeen hundreds,
Speaker 4: in the eighteen hundreds is that it takes a significant
Speaker 4: amount of time to get people from I don't know,
Speaker 4: You're you're you're drawing your like border militia from Kentucky
Speaker 4: and you're you're moving it to Texas.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 4: That takes a lot of time. And so basically it
Speaker 4: was like, okay, so if if you're Texas and you're
Speaker 4: getting attacked by someone, you're supposed to be able to
Speaker 4: use your own troops to defend it, and you're supposed
Speaker 4: to be able to like sort of semi autonomously run
Speaker 4: your own defense policy, right, And that was supposed to
Speaker 4: be a thing to let to allow states to like
Speaker 4: you know, use their militia to do stuff before like
Speaker 4: federal troops got there. Abbott is arguing that people crossing
Speaker 4: the border from Mexico is an invasion and that this
Speaker 4: allows him to like legally allows him to start doing
Speaker 4: this stuff. And this is like, it's it's funny because
Speaker 4: you can even see that the Biden administration people being like,
Speaker 4: you've got to be fucking kidding me, because like obviously,
Speaker 4: like I mean, it's not like Biden doesn't want to
Speaker 4: murder people coming over the border, but you know, Biden's
Speaker 4: people are like, well, okay, like no, obviously this is
Speaker 4: not a war, right, I mean just a no in
Speaker 4: fact that war we're talking about.
Speaker 11: No, Yeah, I mean that that was kind of always
Speaker 11: the obvious endpoint with this invasion military males rehetoric, right,
Speaker 11: it was like, okay, well we better shoot them all
Speaker 11: like that that was play what they were shooting for.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it's it's really it's gotten. Really, it's gotten
Speaker 4: really really grim and it's it's gotten you know again,
Speaker 4: It's it's literally getting to this point when they're trying
Speaker 4: to argue that there is a physical war going on
Speaker 4: and you read these articles about it, and the press
Speaker 4: will be like, well they're saying this because like people
Speaker 4: are crossing the border and like there's cartels. It's like,
Speaker 4: what the fuck are you talking about? This has nothing, like,
Speaker 4: this is nothing. This is literally nonsense. Like it is.
Speaker 4: They are pointing at the sky and going the sky
Speaker 4: is orange, and the press is going, well, if you like,
Speaker 4: if you stare directly into the sun and then blink,
Speaker 4: it looks like maybe this sky is a little bit
Speaker 4: or just like what the fuck are you people doing?
Speaker 4: It's it's it's genuay at least it's some of the
Speaker 4: worst shertalistic about practice I've ever seen you see this
Speaker 4: like every single time they're trying to do this sort
Speaker 4: of like ah balance, It's like, no, there's no actual
Speaker 4: sort of balance here. But on the other hand, this
Speaker 4: doesn't matter because the Supreme Court was just like, yeah,
Speaker 4: this can go into effect, right, And like.
Speaker 11: The other thing you'll see, like I guess this was
Speaker 11: more in the Trump era, right, was like, yeah, you'd
Speaker 11: see someone Trump would do a thing and everyone rather
Speaker 11: than just being like if this one's fucking illegal, everyone,
Speaker 11: can we just wrap this up? Seth Aberton would write
Speaker 11: seventy five thousand tweets about how like it was going
Speaker 11: to result, and people began to have this belief that
Speaker 11: like the fucking Supreme Court was made up of like
Speaker 11: magical rainbow unicorns who were gonna sweep in and save
Speaker 11: us all from fascistm Like these are the same people
Speaker 11: hanging out with the guys who had the like fascist
Speaker 11: statues and yeah, taking massive kickbags. Like it's just none
Speaker 11: of this legality stuff. I guess, No, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 4: It doesn't matter.
Speaker 11: It's a problem, yeah, And like I think this is
Speaker 11: something that you were hint to get earlier, but like
Speaker 11: it shouldn't factor in our organizing. Like I see so
Speaker 11: many people pinned so much hope on ex court case
Speaker 11: or why court case like institutions created by people who
Speaker 11: owned other human beings. I'm not going to fucking save us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And you know, this is something that the right
Speaker 4: has actually, I think understood it very well, partially in
Speaker 4: the way that they've they've been able to sort of
Speaker 4: institutionally capture huge portions of the court system. And because
Speaker 4: they understand that the law is fucking meaningless and you know,
Speaker 4: it's it's you can because and you can just tell
Speaker 4: the cops to do whatever the fuck you want. One
Speaker 4: of the strategies they've been using has like if specifically,
Speaker 4: to get this bill through, is by just having judges
Speaker 4: issue like temporary injunctions and other injunctions to like allow
Speaker 4: them to go into effect, but then you know, with
Speaker 4: the intention of just never letting them expire. Right, So
Speaker 4: what you're getting basically is just judges implementing policy by
Speaker 4: fiat by continuously going, oh, well, this can go, this
Speaker 4: can go because we're giving like a where we're you know,
Speaker 4: we're on like our thirty eighth one month injunction and right,
Speaker 4: you know, and this is the thing that like the
Speaker 4: Biden administration's plan to deal with this is to be like, well,
Speaker 4: you shouldn't be able to do that, but like, how
Speaker 4: are you going to stop them? Right? The court system
Speaker 4: is set up in such a way that these people
Speaker 4: are just feudal lords. They're almost completely autonomous. The only
Speaker 4: people who can overrule them are the people above them.
Speaker 4: But the problem there too, and this is what the
Speaker 4: Republicans have been using very effectively, is that it takes
Speaker 4: time for a court above it to you know, just
Speaker 4: to overrule the like insane thing the court below them
Speaker 4: is doing. And if the court below them is just
Speaker 4: constantly churning out just nonsense over and over again, then
Speaker 4: they can just do whatever the fuck they want. Because
Speaker 4: even even if the court above them actually did want
Speaker 4: to do something about this, which in a very rare
Speaker 4: cases sometimes happens, they literally can't because they've just been
Speaker 4: you know, because they're just sort of swamped by all
Speaker 4: of this just absolute bullshit that's being thrown out.
Speaker 11: Yeah, Like, if you take a case which just to
Speaker 11: not make this like a partizan thing, if you take
Speaker 11: a case in which, like the Supreme Court might line
Speaker 11: up with the I guess I love of republic competition
Speaker 11: as a position that many people listening to this podcast
Speaker 11: might take. For instance, California's gun laws, right, California passes
Speaker 11: so many fucking gun laws so often that the time
Speaker 11: that it takes for even if they are like contravening
Speaker 11: something like the Brewin decision, right or the spirit of
Speaker 11: the Brewing decision, it takes so long for them to
Speaker 11: pass all the way up and maybe eventually go to
Speaker 11: Supreme Court, maybe not right, that that in effect, California
Speaker 11: can do things which seem like the Supreme Court would
Speaker 11: say they were unconstitutional. It doesn't really matter because they
Speaker 11: can still do them right. And with the go go
Speaker 11: to the Night Circuit in California, you can make decisions
Speaker 11: that affirm those and like it doesn't matter, It doesn't
Speaker 11: matter what's constitutional or more importantly, like what's just.
Speaker 4: If you look if you're looking for the justices for
Speaker 4: justice who are looking in the wrong place. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 11: And when it comes to bord Us, I guess before
Speaker 11: that me is talking about like that kills people, you know,
Speaker 11: like like and some of the most desperate people on earth.
Speaker 11: Like I've been to the border in Texas, you know,
Speaker 11: like you're not swimming across that river because you think
Speaker 11: you might get a PlayStation five when you get to
Speaker 11: the other side, Like it's fucking dangerous, and the journey
Speaker 11: to get there. People who tend to come across the
Speaker 11: land border to Texas sort of want to like micros
Speaker 11: ain't fucking stupid. They have access to all the same
Speaker 11: news and information that you do. They have smartphones that
Speaker 11: might be a little bit older, but they can still
Speaker 11: read shit and that they know that the ninth Circuit
Speaker 11: is kinder. So if they have the money, they will
Speaker 11: come to California. It's for some people end up in
Speaker 11: California without very much money. We've seen that lot with
Speaker 11: African migrants in Tichuina, But like a lot of the
Speaker 11: people going to Texas, it's because that's the land route
Speaker 11: walking north and they don't have the finances to go
Speaker 11: anywhere else. And those people are extremely like they're like
Speaker 11: there are any number of reasons why they they have
Speaker 11: legitimate right to asylum or just a right not to
Speaker 11: be fucking profiled, or like any other person of kind
Speaker 11: of living in Texas has a basic right note to
Speaker 11: be profiled, and demonizing those people is being used as
Speaker 11: a like a trojan horse just to do straight up
Speaker 11: racism law.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then and meanwhile, like, you know, you have
Speaker 4: fucking Clarence Thomas, who is sitting there, who has gotten
Speaker 4: more kickbacks than every single one who's people who's crossed
Speaker 4: the border of their total wealth combined, is just sitting
Speaker 4: there being like, nah, fuck you, it's legal to throw
Speaker 4: these people into the chainsaw, Like it's fine.
Speaker 11: Yeah, exactly, Like, I don't really know how people maintain
Speaker 11: their faith in a system which holds this dude completely
Speaker 11: unaccountable for very obviously being bent like bent is in corrupt.
Speaker 11: I'm not using a homophobic slur.
Speaker 4: No, this is the way that's a homophobe. Yeah, I
Speaker 4: think it's really a British English British wild Yeah, I've
Speaker 4: never heard of either of those.
Speaker 11: I really. Okay, we're welcome to the podcast where I
Speaker 11: say British things and in leep some of them out.
Speaker 4: Do you know what else says British things and occasionally
Speaker 4: has some of them bleed it out.
Speaker 11: It's chump a Casino presented by Wangkas.
Speaker 4: And we're back from whatever insane gat We should at
Speaker 4: some point do an episode about the gambling law changes
Speaker 4: I'm sure that'll be fine.
Speaker 11: With yeah, go down, Well, it would be great.
Speaker 4: Oh boy, So we're there are some other so okay,
Speaker 4: So the Texas Senate before case is coming in sort
Speaker 4: of like mid late April, which is now this month,
Speaker 4: by the way, which is nuts great, say snipe. There
Speaker 4: are a couple of other cases coming down the pipeline
Speaker 4: that we wanted to talk about because so obviously the
Speaker 4: Streame court you know, has directly already done stuff with
Speaker 4: s before, but the law there's still still in the
Speaker 4: process for the lawsuit. There's also a case about methic pristone,
Speaker 4: which is an aborder factor, which is, you know, one
Speaker 4: of the ways that if you are if you're in
Speaker 4: a place where it is illegal for you to normally
Speaker 4: get an abortion, this is a way you can do it.
Speaker 4: So okay. The basis of this case is that in
Speaker 4: twenty sixteen twenty twenty one, the FDA did one of
Speaker 4: the few good things it's ever done, and there were
Speaker 4: some sort of changes to legal classifications around for pristone
Speaker 4: that allowed you to get it, not allowed you to
Speaker 4: get it without having to get it directly prescribed by
Speaker 4: a doctor. So you know, you could have nurs practitioners
Speaker 4: do it. And also it was a thing that didn't
Speaker 4: work like you can get it over the counter like
Speaker 4: it was. It was not a thing that suddenly that
Speaker 4: requires an enormous amount of sort of doctor bullshit. And
Speaker 4: it also used to require physical visits, so you'd have
Speaker 4: to go find a doctor in another state and get
Speaker 4: into private to you. And so that all went away.
Speaker 4: You're able to get it through telemedicine. And immediately basically
Speaker 4: after I get I guess probably the peak of the
Speaker 4: Republican counter revolution in the last four years, where they
Speaker 4: destroyed the National well, they destroyed the tatted remains of ROW,
Speaker 4: A bunch of like deranged right wing groups set about
Speaker 4: to get messapristomee bands and so basically what they're trying
Speaker 4: to do is overturn. They're trying to get its approval
Speaker 4: by the FDA overturn, and also the approval for the
Speaker 4: generic version of it overturned. Right, And this is the
Speaker 4: whole strategy here is very weird because okay, so this
Speaker 4: is one of the things about the US and part
Speaker 4: of the reason all of this court stuff is so
Speaker 4: weird because of the structure of the sort of regional
Speaker 4: autonomy of the courts. You can basically just do court shopping.
Speaker 4: You can go find some like guy who's basically a
Speaker 4: feudal baron in Texas and be like, hey, you hate abortion,
Speaker 4: Like here, write some piece of paper that says this
Speaker 4: is legal now. So there have been a series of
Speaker 4: sort of battles over different levels of courts, you know,
Speaker 4: like approving or disapproving some things. This is actually this
Speaker 4: is one of these cases that's actually so obviously it's
Speaker 4: the the immediate consequence here is if the Supreme Court
Speaker 4: decides that you can ban this, it's going to get really,
Speaker 4: really fucking bad for a lot of people. But this
Speaker 4: is also a case that feeds into another trend that's
Speaker 4: been happening, which is the Republicans attempting to use the
Speaker 4: court system to just completely annihilate the federal bureaucracy. Because
Speaker 4: the other thing that's at stake here and this is,
Speaker 4: you know, obviously the people's access to getting abortions is
Speaker 4: the most important part of it. The subsequent less important
Speaker 4: part of it is that right now there is a
Speaker 4: eight there are national standards for for prescriptions. Right there's
Speaker 4: unified nationals like the ADA is unified national standards for
Speaker 4: sort of food safety and like and if this gets
Speaker 4: knocked out, that's like gone. Yeah, and so suddenly large
Speaker 4: massive parts I mean like courts having the ability to
Speaker 4: just sort of go in and nuke FDA approvals for stuff,
Speaker 4: right states being able to like this is going to
Speaker 4: rip like tear, like like tearing the fucking guts out
Speaker 4: of the entire American sort of like legal bureaucracy. It's
Speaker 4: it's coming apart, Yeah, it's yeah.
Speaker 11: And and the the they're like the medical you know,
Speaker 11: your access to medicines that someone else doesn't want you
Speaker 11: to have.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is one of these cases that has you know,
Speaker 4: there's there's sort of two elements at work here, right,
Speaker 4: there's there there's there's there's the there's the immediate like
Speaker 4: Republicans are trying to ban every single way you can
Speaker 4: possibly get an abortion to force people to have kids
Speaker 4: because this is you know, this is part of their
Speaker 4: sort of reactionary ideology. And then there's the other part
Speaker 4: of it, where there's been there's been a few other
Speaker 4: cases like this too. One of the one of the
Speaker 4: things that looks like they're trying to do is get
Speaker 4: we're gonna I'm gonna do a full upside about this
Speaker 4: at some point when I can get a good labor
Speaker 4: lawyer to talk about it. But they're trying to overturn
Speaker 4: the National Labor Relations Act, which is the act that
Speaker 4: basically sets up the right to unionization and the whole
Speaker 4: the whole process of how how labor mediation works. And
Speaker 4: I mean then there's other ones where I mean, like
Speaker 4: really substantively enormous parts of the American sort of the
Speaker 4: American state are just being torn apart in ways that
Speaker 4: are specifically designed to just allow corporations and these like
Speaker 4: fiefdom judges to have effectively unlimited political power.
Speaker 11: Yeah, I don't know, it's it's a fucking bleak, Like
Speaker 11: it's I mean, it's also predictable, right, Like it's kind
Speaker 11: of the nature of the state, and it's the nature
Speaker 11: of these people to want to take away Like the
Speaker 11: state ultimately is not there to protect you, It's there
Speaker 11: to protect capital. And like it's a failure of our
Speaker 11: organizing when we when we keep going back to the
Speaker 11: state and asking it to do something fundamentally has no
Speaker 11: interest in doing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and this is really a substantive issue with you know,
Speaker 4: I remember this. This was the ACOU strategy under Trump.
Speaker 4: I've talked about this in the show before. It is
Speaker 4: the sho U strategy under Trump was to go to
Speaker 4: the courts and win there. And I mean this is
Speaker 4: this has been the sort of what the political strategy
Speaker 4: getting back to sort of the civil rights era. And
Speaker 4: that's it's you can't do this anymore because it doesn't
Speaker 4: It doesn't even like whether or not you are correct,
Speaker 4: like like legally correct about a thing right which used
Speaker 4: to be what this was just sort of hinged on
Speaker 4: and whether you could convince justice to this, like this
Speaker 4: doesn't matter anymore. Like they've you know, like if if
Speaker 4: you if you read the ruling on on like if
Speaker 4: you actually go through and read the ruling that overturned
Speaker 4: Rode Wade right, like the league, the legal logic in
Speaker 4: there is deranged. It's just like, yeah, we didn't have
Speaker 4: this X number of years ago, so fuck it, Like
Speaker 4: you can't do this now. It's like this is this
Speaker 4: is nonsense, but it doesn't matter because the the the
Speaker 4: actual weight of the law is not is not you know,
Speaker 4: a sort of like series of debates about like logic
Speaker 4: or about the efficacy or the meeting of text. It's
Speaker 4: just about who has the power to point guns at people?
Speaker 4: And the answer is you don't have that you, you,
Speaker 4: dear listener, do not have that power. Okay, do you
Speaker 4: know who else is going to destroy the American federal bureaucracy? Oh?
Speaker 11: Yes, yes I do.
Speaker 5: Mayeah.
Speaker 11: It's it's a production and services. It's pot this podcast,
Speaker 11: and we are back for more horrors.
Speaker 4: So we're going to talk about one more case, which
Speaker 4: is grap Pass versus Johnson, which is a case to
Speaker 4: decide whether or not you can make it illegal to
Speaker 4: be homeless.
Speaker 11: Yeah, yeah, talking pointing guns at people. This one's This
Speaker 11: one's about pointing guns at homeless people, which is great,
Speaker 11: great and good. So this is one I've been following
Speaker 11: a little bit just because one thing that Todd Lauria
Speaker 11: loves to do is criminalize poverty. And I happen to,
Speaker 11: unfortunately live in a city of which he is mayor
Speaker 11: in San Diego. We have seen, like it's all the
Speaker 11: things they told your Republicans would do, our Democrat mayor
Speaker 11: is doing. And what the Grants passed usus Johnson case
Speaker 11: is about. It's a city of Grant's past, which I
Speaker 11: guess is a place in Oregon, and it's whether they
Speaker 11: can criminalize sleeping on the street if there are no
Speaker 11: safe shelter beds available. So that the idea here being
Speaker 11: that like again, like this is one has to understand
Speaker 11: that I'm speaking from the logic of the state when
Speaker 11: I try and explain this, like that, if there is
Speaker 11: a shelter bed to go to, they can compel you
Speaker 11: to go to it with threat of prosecution, right or criminalization.
Speaker 11: But if there is not a shelter bed to go to,
Speaker 11: then like you're not somehow your culpability changes, right, Like
Speaker 11: you're not refusing to take shelter there is no shelter
Speaker 11: few to take. And so Grant's past is obviously trying
Speaker 11: to criminalize people even when there are shelter beeds available. Now,
Speaker 11: what's interesting about Grant's pass is that not the place
Speaker 11: to the court case. What's interesting about the court case
Speaker 11: is that you'll see these big liberal cities filing amicus
Speaker 11: briefs amicus. It literally means it's from amicus curii friend
Speaker 11: of the court, right, which they can do in favor
Speaker 11: of either side. San Diego, Los Angeles, other large democratic cities,
Speaker 11: I'm sure all filing briefs in favor of criminalizing living
Speaker 11: on the street even when there are not shelter beds available. Now,
Speaker 11: if we look at the San Diego context specifically, one
Speaker 11: of the questions which will come up in this case
Speaker 11: is what is a shafe shelter bed? So what San
Speaker 11: Diego likes to do currently is put people into tents
Speaker 11: in parking lots where they often flood because because San
Speaker 11: Diego is not designed to deal with rain, and because
Speaker 11: our city has completely failed to clear out storm drains,
Speaker 11: resulting in people losing their homes in this winter, right,
Speaker 11: and so some of these parking lots flood where people
Speaker 11: have lived are forced to live. These tents are not like,
Speaker 11: they're not even good tents. Actually they managed to buy
Speaker 11: this is remarkable. Actually, if you were buying a tent there,
Speaker 11: can you think of any well, there's no way for
Speaker 11: me to phrase this. They bought fucking tents with slurs
Speaker 11: on the side. I don't know how you managed to do. Yeah,
Speaker 11: it's like the tents are quote Esquimo brand Jesus Christ. Yeah,
Speaker 11: it's it's it's it's incredible stuff. Like it's see, there
Speaker 11: was no way to be like, what would you be
Speaker 11: concerned about when buying a tent because a slur on
Speaker 11: the side would not have come up.
Speaker 4: I would not think about that. Why why would you?
Speaker 4: Why would there be slur? Why would there be slurs
Speaker 4: on the side of your tent? Yeah? Yeah, why were
Speaker 4: you doing here?
Speaker 13: How could you given the purchasing of the third largest
Speaker 13: city in California, somehow elects to purchase a tent, which
Speaker 13: is racist, Like, I don't know, but that's.
Speaker 11: Why I am not a member of the San Diego
Speaker 11: Democrat Party. So one of the things that will come
Speaker 11: up is what constitutes a safe shelter in practice. Again,
Speaker 11: this doesn't matter hugely other than it's a Supreme Court
Speaker 11: giving a nod to local governments to further criminalize being
Speaker 11: un housed, to drive unhouse people further from services, further
Speaker 11: from site. Right in San Diego's case, that means into canyons,
Speaker 11: into rivers, rivers, flood canyons, get extremely hot in the summer.
Speaker 11: More than one person every single day already dies on
Speaker 11: our streets here in an extremely wealthy and prosperous area
Speaker 11: of the world. This will make it worse because they
Speaker 11: will get that nod to continue criminalizing people rather than trying.
Speaker 1: To help them.
Speaker 11: In practice, what cities will do, including San Diego, is
Speaker 11: just hold back a few shelter beds to allow them
Speaker 11: to cite anyone. Right it practice, they're still going to
Speaker 11: cite people even if the demand for beds is much
Speaker 11: higher than the provision of beds. So like, in that case,
Speaker 11: they will still continue to find it's not a workaround.
Speaker 11: But they think it is right that they can just
Speaker 11: criminalize being in house in this fashion. But it it does,
Speaker 11: it represents like a nod from the top down right
Speaker 11: to go even harder after people who are too poor
Speaker 11: to make rent at a time when rent is less
Speaker 11: affordable than it has been in generations. And so like
Speaker 11: it's one to watch. It's one where like yet again
Speaker 11: you find like the Democrats, I guess, lining up on
Speaker 11: the right hand side of the issue, the right wing
Speaker 11: side of the issue, the state violence side of the issue. Right,
Speaker 11: and it will I'm sure open up the door to
Speaker 11: more what they call camping bands, which is the euphemism
Speaker 11: again they are bands on being un housed within city limits, right,
Speaker 11: And I think it's one to keep an eye on.
Speaker 11: But again, like I don't it's Clarence Thomas the guy
Speaker 11: who goes to the billionaire's house with the racist statues
Speaker 11: and the Nazi statues, Like, he's not the guy who's
Speaker 11: going to come in swinging for the person who has
Speaker 11: to sleep under the underpass because they can't make rent,
Speaker 11: you know, like.
Speaker 4: And like like if if you think the fucking liberal
Speaker 4: justices are going to give a shit either, like these
Speaker 4: are these are the people whose fundamental political principles that
Speaker 4: the police have the right to. Like, Okay, there is
Speaker 4: a decision that I can't remember the fucking name of
Speaker 4: that was a it was it was, it was, it was.
Speaker 4: It should have been a very very basic you are
Speaker 4: guaranteed due process thing right under the Fourth Amendments and this,
Speaker 4: and in a nine to o decision, the Supreme Court
Speaker 4: ruled that the cops are allowed to violate people's due
Speaker 4: process because if they didn't do this, there couldn't be
Speaker 4: a functional police force in this country because this is
Speaker 4: how the police were doing all their fucking work. So
Speaker 4: if you think those people right, that was nine oh
Speaker 4: nine zero decision, that was that was a fucking Ruth
Speaker 4: Bader Ginsburg special, Right, those people are going to be like,
Speaker 4: oh hey, damn, maybe people who don't own property, have rights?
Speaker 4: Like how no?
Speaker 11: Like yeah, no, Like, Look, when faced with a choice
Speaker 11: between like liberty and then then the necessity of maintaining
Speaker 11: a state's capacity to do violence to anyone at any time,
Speaker 11: they chose the latter right. And I guess, like, if
Speaker 11: I can get on my soap box for a minute, like,
Speaker 11: you need to stop expecting these people to come and
Speaker 11: save you, like specifically with reference to the fucking Grants
Speaker 11: past case, Like the person who is going to stop
Speaker 11: your unhoused neighbor dying is you. It's not an NGO,
Speaker 11: it's not the city, it's not the county, it's not
Speaker 11: the feds. Those people fundamentally that they're the incentive is
Speaker 11: not for them to care. Like your incentive, as a
Speaker 11: person who shares humanity with that person is to care
Speaker 11: and to do something. And like, yeah, I guess, like,
Speaker 11: don't wait, take the time you would have spent reading
Speaker 11: about a fucking Supreme Court case and make sandwiches and
Speaker 11: go hand them out, because that is the only way
Speaker 11: we solve this.
Speaker 4: I think that's as good a place as I need
Speaker 4: to stop. Yeah, this has been making up here.
Speaker 2: Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the universe.
Speaker 5: It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 8: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.
Speaker 3: Dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 3: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
Speaker 3: find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at
Speaker 3: coolzonemedia dot com slash sources.
Speaker 5: Thanks for listening.