Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
Speaker 1: can make your own decisions. Your children should be home.
Speaker 1: Your kids aren't actually gay, you've just crooned to them.
Speaker 1: Welcome to It could have happened here today. We are
Speaker 1: talking about something that did happen just a few days ago,
Speaker 1: and we'll be discussing it's possible ramifications going forward and
Speaker 1: similar subsequent attacks that are most likely going to take
Speaker 1: place throughout this next month. I'm Person Davis with me?
Speaker 1: Is Chris Hello? Ready ready to hear about a lot
Speaker 1: of threats of genocide and a whole bunch of audio
Speaker 1: clips of fascists? You know? Okay, I got I got
Speaker 1: one episode where there was like a pretty clean win
Speaker 1: and like a good thing happened, and so now I'm
Speaker 1: I'm ready to go back to getting exterminated. This is
Speaker 1: so this episode is going to be kind of I
Speaker 1: don't speak German style, I guess if if we were
Speaker 1: to compare it to another one of our competitors in
Speaker 1: the field. Um, yeah, so uh, I mean, there's been
Speaker 1: a lot of threats against Pride events over the course
Speaker 1: the past month. There's we've we've pointed towards some in Idaho. Uh,
Speaker 1: there has been some in air Zona, there has been
Speaker 1: lots in Texas. By the time this episode has dropped,
Speaker 1: the Gundalane event in Idaho would have already taken place.
Speaker 1: We are recording that just just before war on On
Speaker 1: on June tenth, So I'm unsure of how that's gone
Speaker 1: at this point. Hopefully nothing horrible happened. But but but
Speaker 1: if everyone dies, that that's why we're not talking about
Speaker 1: it because it hasn't happened yet. Oh but yeah, we're
Speaker 1: gonna be talking about an attack on a Pride event
Speaker 1: in Dallas, Texas that happened on June four, So starting
Speaker 1: starting kind of closer to the lead up to this.
Speaker 1: On the Conservative trends setting limbs of TikTok, who now
Speaker 1: has over one point two million followers on the Twitter
Speaker 1: account ran by Chaia Check, they started a threat titled
Speaker 1: quote Mega Drag Thread. They say it's innocent. They say
Speaker 1: it's about inclusion and acceptance. They say no one is
Speaker 1: trying to confuse corrupt or sexualized kids. They lie. Increasingly,
Speaker 1: many on the far right are targeting family friendly drag events,
Speaker 1: including Drake time story events at libraries across the country.
Speaker 1: The Gundalane event in Idaho was precursored by a whole
Speaker 1: bunch of attacks on drag story events at the libraries
Speaker 1: inside Idaho and the very church gathering that they announced
Speaker 1: the event to oppose the Pride on June eleven. That
Speaker 1: whole gathering at the church was about removing LGBTQ materials
Speaker 1: from libraries and targeting any drag queens who do any
Speaker 1: types of story times. So this this over thirty tweet
Speaker 1: long thread by lips of TikTok contained a list of
Speaker 1: drag queens, story how where flyers with dates and locations,
Speaker 1: and family friendly or all ages drag events that had
Speaker 1: recently took place over upcoming for Pride month. One such
Speaker 1: event right check posted about was a Pride themed family
Speaker 1: friendly drag event that was to take place on Saturday,
Speaker 1: June four, hosted at a gay venue in the progressive
Speaker 1: neighborhood of Doubts, Texas. In their post, Limps of TikTok
Speaker 1: included the date and location for the upcoming event, as
Speaker 1: well as an unrelated picture of one of the drag
Speaker 1: performers wearing a skip be outfit. I think right check
Speaker 1: just searched the internet for a picture of this one
Speaker 1: person wearing as revealing clothing as possible based on the
Speaker 1: entire intimate presence, and like it's still not a nude photo.
Speaker 1: It's just like someone would like like a skimpy outfit.
Speaker 1: But anyway, you know, you're trying to be like, this
Speaker 1: is what your kids are gonna see, which means it's
Speaker 1: it's not, but you know, you know the thing you're
Speaker 1: trying to do. The tweet was shared by a new
Speaker 1: far right group called Protect Texas Kids, who had also
Speaker 1: declared that they were organizing a protest to oppose what
Speaker 1: they called a quote child grooming event. They tweeted out
Speaker 1: the address of the venue and called on people to
Speaker 1: join in on opposition to the family friendly drag show.
Speaker 1: The initial Limps of TikTok tweet about the Dallas All
Speaker 1: Ages drug event raked up over a thousand retweets and
Speaker 1: thousands and thousands of likes. Less than a week later,
Speaker 1: the anti queer attacks moved from the online sphere to
Speaker 1: the outside physical world. I wonder if the mama bearing
Speaker 1: instinct is going to come out in three years when
Speaker 1: the mainstream Democrat party platform and they want to rape
Speaker 1: your kids, and they're all gonna think it's one big, smug,
Speaker 1: little joke. These people, by the way, understand that there
Speaker 1: is a bigger difference between ten years ago and now
Speaker 1: than the wind be between now and in five years
Speaker 1: when they're openly advocating for pedophilia like they've already started doing.
Speaker 1: You people are the symptom of a dying society. And
Speaker 1: you know it where. That's John Doyle, a self described
Speaker 1: Christian fascist, standing outside the family Friendly drag event at
Speaker 1: nine am in the morning, yelling through a megaphone at
Speaker 1: the families with kids lined up to get inside the
Speaker 1: brunch event. A crowd mostly in khaki shorts and button
Speaker 1: ups surrounded the venue, and enchanted groomer grew umer as
Speaker 1: the group of men kept screaming at the families stuck
Speaker 1: outside waiting on line. Kids just a few feet away
Speaker 1: covered their ears. Amidst the screams and megaphones, one person
Speaker 1: waved a Christian Diminianist flag. A man holding a rosary
Speaker 1: shrieked verbal abuse at the children and parents. The fist
Speaker 1: of tribes will come down very soon. This it's what
Speaker 1: was described as a quote protest immediately materialized as a
Speaker 1: group of men and self described Christian fascists who came
Speaker 1: to attack families at Pride, just yelling abuse at the
Speaker 1: events attendees and staff, threatening people as they arrived and left,
Speaker 1: and creating an actually unsafe environment for children, along with
Speaker 1: a gaggle of far right grifting videographers who quote infiltrated
Speaker 1: the event to film kids without their consent to create
Speaker 1: viral propaganda. There was a very good article by Melissa
Speaker 1: Geara Grant published a few days after the incident titled
Speaker 1: a Pizza Gate in Every City, with the subheading quote
Speaker 1: these conspiracy theories were once fringe. Now they're being fueled
Speaker 1: by Republicans and driving far right anti LGBTQ violence. Now.
Speaker 1: I'm going to read a few quotes from this piece
Speaker 1: throughout our episode today because the writer does a very
Speaker 1: good job tying the current grooming rhetoric to the pattern
Speaker 1: of escalating violence and conspiracism embraced by the right over
Speaker 1: the past few years. So to quote the article, quote
Speaker 1: from the idea that children inside this venue were being
Speaker 1: abused and that such abuse was a plot by Democrats
Speaker 1: to the call to internet provocateurs to record their own evidence,
Speaker 1: as well as the false claims of child rescues made
Speaker 1: by those promoting these conspiracy theories. The attack on Mr Mr,
Speaker 1: which which was the venue that the strike event to placet,
Speaker 1: called to mind the same fears, if not the same
Speaker 1: threat of gun violence as the assault on Comt Ping
Speaker 1: Pong in Washington, d C. In a man motivated by
Speaker 1: the Pizza Gate conspiracy theory arrived at the restaurant with
Speaker 1: a rifle to quote, rescue children from the non existent
Speaker 1: sex trafficking ring supposedly orchestrated by prominent Democrats. Now a
Speaker 1: little more than five years later, of Republicans identify as
Speaker 1: believers of the Pizza Gate successor q and On, and
Speaker 1: the far right's capacity for street violence has grown. At
Speaker 1: the same time, where once most elected Republican officials would
Speaker 1: at least nominally distance themselves from Pizza Gate pushers out
Speaker 1: on the fringe, that wall has largely eroded. Across the country.
Speaker 1: GOP lawmakers have waged a legislative crusade targeting queer and
Speaker 1: trans kids, smearing opponents as groomers. Language that rhyme was
Speaker 1: with the pedophile claims that inspired the attack on commt
Speaker 1: Ping Pong, and where once the targets of these conspiracy
Speaker 1: theories were largely confined to select group of Democrat lawmakers
Speaker 1: and their allies, the fearmongering, amplified by Fox News and
Speaker 1: prominent conservative social media accounts, is now targeting all LGBTQ people,
Speaker 1: from national figures to members of your local community. The
Speaker 1: stage is set for a Pizza Gate in any city,
Speaker 1: and just like Pizza Gate, where cases of threats of
Speaker 1: violence escalated to the point of an attempted arson and
Speaker 1: a young white man storming the establishment firing a rifle inside,
Speaker 1: the homophobic and transphobic violence that is advocated or physically
Speaker 1: committed is truly seen as like righteously justified by those
Speaker 1: who do it, and even if those who promote it
Speaker 1: don't sincerely hold those like illogical beliefs. Successful propagandists know
Speaker 1: how to effectively frame bigoted violence as a moral imperative
Speaker 1: simply as a way to encourage attacks on their own
Speaker 1: ideological enemies. SIME. The far right conservatives and fascists who
Speaker 1: made explicit threats of genocidal violence were not met unopposed.
Speaker 1: There was what seems to me a mix of more
Speaker 1: official security from the gay venue that usually functions as
Speaker 1: a bar, as well as community defense volunteers and anti
Speaker 1: fascists who put their body in between the fascists and
Speaker 1: the families with children. Community community members wore low key
Speaker 1: pride infected block attire, black masks, and rainbow bandanas, with
Speaker 1: some holding trans and queer pride flags, which can come
Speaker 1: in handy for blocking off unwanted persons. Not only did
Speaker 1: the community defense protect families and attendees, but also worked
Speaker 1: to protect the performers who are being followed after the
Speaker 1: event was over by fascists. The Elm Fork John Brown
Speaker 1: Gun Club did a stand up job documenting the event
Speaker 1: as it happened and also doing work after the fact
Speaker 1: to I d the people who are leading the homophobic attacks.
Speaker 1: I truly believe if there was less of a community
Speaker 1: defense effort, the day could have gone much much uglier,
Speaker 1: and I think that's a part that's worth emphasizing, Like
Speaker 1: everyone who showed up to oppose the fascists did an
Speaker 1: amazing job. I mean, like they It's honestly, I've I've
Speaker 1: looked at so much footage of this day, um, from
Speaker 1: the footage the fascists were filming to the footage that
Speaker 1: the John Brown Gun Club was putting out, and there
Speaker 1: were so many times where people in with rainbow masks
Speaker 1: were physically preventing fascists from chasing down kids. There was
Speaker 1: barely enough of them right and you you would always,
Speaker 1: you would always want more more community defenders there. But
Speaker 1: the ones who did show up deserve much gratitude for
Speaker 1: putting their bodies on the line. Eventually, police did show
Speaker 1: up and tried to keep some of the conservative protesters
Speaker 1: who were screaming groomer at children on one side of
Speaker 1: the street across from the venue, But even with the
Speaker 1: cops there, self described fascists continued to chase families as
Speaker 1: they walk with their kids to their car, and anti
Speaker 1: fascists and counter demonstrators were the ones to block the
Speaker 1: homophobes path to prevent them from the further harassing kids
Speaker 1: and families, while while the counter demonstrators were yelling at
Speaker 1: the fascists to leave the kids alone. After the police
Speaker 1: did arrive, Christian fascist leader John Doyle talked about how
Speaker 1: police should quote go in there and put bullets in
Speaker 1: their heads. They should be rewarded for it. That's what
Speaker 1: the badges for. And now I'm gonna play a clip
Speaker 1: of of him saying that it's a it's a little
Speaker 1: bit hard to hear, but here's my due diligence. I
Speaker 1: don't avertize everything the sheriffs and so yeah, that is
Speaker 1: harkening back to the very real history of police's willingness
Speaker 1: to enforce homophobic laws, something that these Christian conservatives and
Speaker 1: fascists want to bring back. And if you think some
Speaker 1: police wouldn't enforce such laws, then oh boy, I don't
Speaker 1: know what to tell you, Like, yeah, their entire job
Speaker 1: is to enforce whatever the laws are. And lots of
Speaker 1: those cops, I'm sure don't have great opinions on gay people.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I I know they were like like I
Speaker 1: I've had conversations with people who are like I don't know,
Speaker 1: like sixteen seventeen eighteen, who like you know, like who who?
Speaker 1: And I don't want to be too hard on them.
Speaker 1: But it's like people who got their sort of education
Speaker 1: to queer history on Tumbler, and they'll do things like
Speaker 1: well like assist white gay men were like never oppressed
Speaker 1: in the US that it's like no, like like like
Speaker 1: you yeah, you you you could be just assist white
Speaker 1: gay dude and like like really like not even really
Speaker 1: like fifteen years ago, it was pretty common for people
Speaker 1: to just like get the ship beating out of him
Speaker 1: on the street for being gay. And cops, cops are
Speaker 1: participate in this, like regular people participate in this, and
Speaker 1: this looks like what we're heading back to but sumbly
Speaker 1: even worse. So if you if you look around the
Speaker 1: social media feed of many many cops, as I do
Speaker 1: for funds sometimes, um, just like you know, like cops
Speaker 1: and they're like personal feeds. And if you look at
Speaker 1: like who they follow, what right wing influencers they follow,
Speaker 1: what churches they attend, you can don't be fooled into
Speaker 1: thinking that cops will not enforce homophobic laws. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: love this ship like and I mean anyway, um, one
Speaker 1: of one of their stated goals is to regress on
Speaker 1: gay rights and to have their version of a Christian
Speaker 1: hegemonic order enforced by the violence of law. And here
Speaker 1: is Doyle again saying as such at the event everything.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna read what he actually says there in case
Speaker 1: you could not hear it, quote, It's going to be
Speaker 1: so fun when we take away all of your rights,
Speaker 1: every single one of them. Let's now talk about some
Speaker 1: of the people and groups who organized this confrontation and
Speaker 1: the resulting propaganda piece put together by the right. So
Speaker 1: one of the main people was Kelly new Dirt need
Speaker 1: kneed Diert new I think, I think what cares one
Speaker 1: of they suck? Yes, one of the people was Kelly Needert,
Speaker 1: one of the Christian fascist organizers responsible for setting up
Speaker 1: the Facebook group for the attack on the Pride event
Speaker 1: this past weekend. She's worked with Gropers and Proud Boys
Speaker 1: in the past for her Young Conservative of Texas events
Speaker 1: at University of North Texas and is a self described
Speaker 1: quote based Christian fascist her words not mine. She's also
Speaker 1: hosted a campus event with Jeff Younger, an anti trans
Speaker 1: Republican candidate for the Texas House of Representatives who came
Speaker 1: to prominence on the right for attempting to block his
Speaker 1: daughter's access to gender affirming healthcare. And who ultimately failed
Speaker 1: on both accounts good good for her Kelly's. Kelly's current
Speaker 1: project is a new anti trans hit group called Protect
Speaker 1: Texas Kids, who she's she calls herself the executive director of,
Speaker 1: but she's basically the main driving force behind it. Was
Speaker 1: under the Protect Texas Kids banner that she organized the
Speaker 1: harassment attack on the All Ages Drag Show, quoting from
Speaker 1: Pizza Gate in Every City again quote. With her new group,
Speaker 1: Nader says that quote, we will host protests of clinics
Speaker 1: that do gender firm and care for minors and school
Speaker 1: districts slash teachers who teach lgbt Q propaganda and critical
Speaker 1: race theory. Protect Texas Kids is a friendly sounding vehicle
Speaker 1: with which self of a Christian fascists in Texas can
Speaker 1: go into LGBTQ community spaces armed with video and claims
Speaker 1: to be there to investigate. All of this expands on
Speaker 1: a now common playbook produced local events antagonizing queer and
Speaker 1: trans people, then go on Fox News, News Max and
Speaker 1: other right wing media outlets to put the videos in
Speaker 1: front of an even broader audience unquote. The other major
Speaker 1: figure is obviously John Doyle, the guy we've talked about
Speaker 1: a blot this episode so far, and we've included many
Speaker 1: audio clips of him screaming horrible things at kids. Uh.
Speaker 1: He is the Christian fascist leader heard saying things like
Speaker 1: every single one of gay right should be taken away
Speaker 1: and encouraging police to go in there and put a
Speaker 1: bullet in their heads. I guess the parents are drag performers.
Speaker 1: He has a large YouTube channel with over three hundred
Speaker 1: thousand subscribers. Don't don't worry, Chris, It's good to get worse.
Speaker 1: Christian fascists led by both Kelly Newt and John Doyle
Speaker 1: have been terrorizing the University of North Texas campus for months.
Speaker 1: On one occasion, they brought Proud Boy, armed security and
Speaker 1: a technical pickup truck. Now when I say technical, I
Speaker 1: mean like the military style vehicle like that. It was
Speaker 1: a technical built onto a pickup truck, So basically a
Speaker 1: massive truck armed with a pretty pretty intense gun. That
Speaker 1: seems not legal somehow, but it's Texas. It's it is
Speaker 1: absolutely legal. I'm going to place some audio from a
Speaker 1: University of North Texas campus event that took place last
Speaker 1: October featuring Doyle and his crew of fascists I am
Speaker 1: you can't do nothing, you guys. I would play more audio,
Speaker 1: but a high pitched whistle drowns out the rest of
Speaker 1: what he says, and I will not subject you to
Speaker 1: the audio of the whistle because it does a fantastic
Speaker 1: job making the audio completely unlistenable, so much so that
Speaker 1: very soon Doyle just like gave up talking because the
Speaker 1: whistle did a really good job dryting about um. But
Speaker 1: for more background, Doyle, I'll quote from a pizza gate
Speaker 1: in every city again. Quote John Doyle, who yelled about
Speaker 1: rape at children through a megaphone, has organized a stop
Speaker 1: the Steel rally with Nick Quentez. Was a special guest
Speaker 1: at the White Nationalist America First Pack Conference, and as
Speaker 1: the leader of a group titled the American Populist Union,
Speaker 1: he was in audience at a one event billed as
Speaker 1: Hitler Youth without the Hitler. Wait, So can I ask
Speaker 1: the question about this? So I've heard about this event?
Speaker 1: Did they literally write that? Yes, it was called that
Speaker 1: by one of the organizers. Ariel early eighteen year old
Speaker 1: white nationalist social media influencer built as a special guest
Speaker 1: at the camping retreat, saying, I always say these events
Speaker 1: are Hitler youth without the Hitler And what do I
Speaker 1: mean by that? You have to get to the youth.
Speaker 1: They claim Gen Z might be the most conservative generation,
Speaker 1: but honestly, I'm not seeing it. I mean, I guess
Speaker 1: that's good news if you ignore them, if you don't know,
Speaker 1: if you know the Hitler part that well maybe the
Speaker 1: father leader. Also, Kyle Rittenhouse says that he's a John
Speaker 1: Doyle fan. So great and we are back. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: continue to quote from the Pizza Game Every City article again.
Speaker 1: Quote given many existing media connections. Videos from the event
Speaker 1: made by far right content creators, some confronting attendees and performers,
Speaker 1: were widely picked up across right wing social media by
Speaker 1: people including Andy No, Benny Johnson, and Pizza Gate promoter
Speaker 1: Jack Sobiak, who shared a video of one drag performer
Speaker 1: and instructed his followers to contact the state's Department of
Speaker 1: Family and Protective Services. When some of these same videos
Speaker 1: made a two Tucker Carlson's show on Monday Night, he
Speaker 1: introduced a segment by saying, just another weekend in vine Mar,
Speaker 1: selectively airing moments when adults yelled back at people like Doyle,
Speaker 1: accusing them of abuse, or when other adults used their
Speaker 1: bodies to block men from forcing their way into the event.
Speaker 1: All of this was used to portray the people threatening
Speaker 1: the Pride event as the actual victims unquote so yeah.
Speaker 1: Less than forty eight hours after the all ages Drag
Speaker 1: event had begun, it was headlining on Tucker Carlson just
Speaker 1: another weekend in Weimar. On Saturday, at nightclub in Dallas
Speaker 1: held an event called Drag Your Kids to Pride. At
Speaker 1: the event, little kids dance with drag queens and tipped
Speaker 1: them with dollar bills. This is grotesque, sexualizing children always is.
Speaker 1: So there were a small number of brave protesters outside.
Speaker 1: One of them was our friend Alex Stein. He tried
Speaker 1: to get into the event because it was a public event,
Speaker 1: and so he was assaulted. Watch The event on June
Speaker 1: four also attracted an assorted collection of far right media
Speaker 1: personalities or those who aspire to be they themselves. Referred
Speaker 1: to their group of far right videographers as the quote
Speaker 1: avengers of homophobes, among which, as mentioned by Tucker, was
Speaker 1: aspiring comedian and small far right commentator Alex Stein, who
Speaker 1: was prevented entry to the venue by event security and
Speaker 1: community defenders or a sucker would say was assaulted. Here's
Speaker 1: an audio of that interaction. Also, I want to note
Speaker 1: that in the video Alex Stein has a big old
Speaker 1: smirk on his face the entire time, and I think
Speaker 1: you can actually hear that through the way he talks
Speaker 1: the time. And three were askingly, they're preg they're not
Speaker 1: letting me baby here. I can't believe they're not letting
Speaker 1: me in a game. But I thought, you guys are inclusions, right,
Speaker 1: I'm not letuldren. You guys don't think that's weird trying
Speaker 1: to dance in that groom, all right. Some of these
Speaker 1: videographers did make it inside with their cameras, shooting videos
Speaker 1: that misrepresented the drug performances as threatening to children or
Speaker 1: acting in an inappropriate sexual manner, all while making threatening
Speaker 1: comments of their own online or outside in person. One
Speaker 1: who interrogated a drag performer captioned his video quote, these
Speaker 1: groomers need to be exposed for what they are. A
Speaker 1: woman who shot some video from in the side of
Speaker 1: the venue later tweeted, quote, this summer is slaying groomers summer.
Speaker 1: Two far right members of the self described homophobic Avengers
Speaker 1: who made it inside the event to film kids were
Speaker 1: Taylor Hanson, who got a lot of notoriety after filming
Speaker 1: the Ashley Babbit shooting as he was participating in the
Speaker 1: storming of the capital, similar to how Elijah Shaffer was
Speaker 1: like making the events seem like it was this big
Speaker 1: heroic thing and then getting a lot of press coverage
Speaker 1: off of off of his footage. And someone else who
Speaker 1: was who was going inside the event to film kids
Speaker 1: was Aldo but Ziani. After the event, the little collection
Speaker 1: of self described Christian fascists and their propagandists got together
Speaker 1: on Elijah Shaffer's Blaze Media podcast to do a sort
Speaker 1: of round table report back. Now, Elija Shaffer was not
Speaker 1: actually on that episode. John Doyle was filling in as
Speaker 1: the host, self self described and fascist on Doyle but
Speaker 1: Schaefer brands himself as a classic I'm gonna say Christian
Speaker 1: fascist because that's what his rhetoric means. Now, Schaeffer himself
Speaker 1: doesn't use the word fascist, but he does share son
Speaker 1: and rab memes on Twitter and his and his rhetoric
Speaker 1: is indistinguishable from Doyle's who of course, Doyle does use
Speaker 1: the word fascist, and of course Schaefer is totally fine
Speaker 1: with having Doyle fill in as him for host on
Speaker 1: his own show. Anyway, Here is Doyle introducing people on
Speaker 1: that episode, including Turning Point USA representative Elizabel Riley. We
Speaker 1: also have fellow e girl, Isabella Riley want to be
Speaker 1: and I want white confetti, Please, white confetti. She likes
Speaker 1: her confetti, how she likes her country. So anyway, tell
Speaker 1: me what you saw, Aldough, because you got there a
Speaker 1: little bit before I did. And now we all had
Speaker 1: this sort of like you know, homophobic avengers assemble kind
Speaker 1: of thing where everyone did their part. I knew that
Speaker 1: I probably couldn't get in, so I just thought that
Speaker 1: I would assemble my army of young men to go
Speaker 1: and confront these people. But although in Isabella actually infiltrated
Speaker 1: the event and got the viral footage that you've probably
Speaker 1: seen if you've been watching literally any news coverage of
Speaker 1: this event. So that podcast can be found on YouTube
Speaker 1: and Apple podcasts, just openly hosting content that's that's hosted
Speaker 1: by a Christian fascist saying shit about wanting a white America.
Speaker 1: Half a million subscribers on YouTube just yep. So this
Speaker 1: ecosystem of aspiring right wing content creators is part of
Speaker 1: this wave of like twenty something conservative influencers, Like twenty
Speaker 1: something that's like age, like they're all like their mid
Speaker 1: twenties or something. Um. But these conservative influencers that are
Speaker 1: trying to market like old school right wing evangelical bigotry
Speaker 1: to young people as like a cool tread counterculture using
Speaker 1: mem asthetics. Fundamentally, these people are attention hounds. As they
Speaker 1: cover events like these on the ground, you can see
Speaker 1: them smirking the entire time, even when while are acting
Speaker 1: hostile to them, like the spectacle is the point if
Speaker 1: they're not posing an actual, like active threat. What these
Speaker 1: far right videographers hate the most is non engagement, right,
Speaker 1: so if if there's the ability to do non engagement,
Speaker 1: that's what they don't like. The most annoyed these people
Speaker 1: get is when they're met with cold, still silence, like
Speaker 1: in this case with Taylor Hanson. Can you guys, can
Speaker 1: either you guys give me any information on I mean,
Speaker 1: how you feel about what took place in here today
Speaker 1: and about these counter protesters? What do you guys thinking?
Speaker 1: No words? Where do I getting rid of? Why do
Speaker 1: you hide your face? Is it because you're committing crimes?
Speaker 1: Maybe it crimes against children, So they hide their face
Speaker 1: because they're too scared of being identified as pedophiles and groomers. So,
Speaker 1: I mean, you see this. This is a constant reoccurrence
Speaker 1: with antifa and with left wing anarchist groups, and they'll
Speaker 1: hide their face because they think they're all tough and
Speaker 1: hard in big groups. But the minute that they're solowed
Speaker 1: down and or actually ask questions, they have nothing to
Speaker 1: say about their ideology, their beliefs, about the fact that
Speaker 1: they are actually the fascist here in this situation. So,
Speaker 1: I mean, I'd really like to just get one word
Speaker 1: out of you, ma'am, because I mean, you just want
Speaker 1: to be so silent, but you're so humiently defending this.
Speaker 1: I mean, do you have anything to say one more chance?
Speaker 1: They know they're saying ridiculous things like none of which
Speaker 1: reads as genuine, Like they know the absurdity of their
Speaker 1: own replies. In their podcasts, they talk about how disgusted
Speaker 1: they were watching people dance together, but in their own
Speaker 1: videos they're smiling, like relaxed, excited about what's going on
Speaker 1: and how they'll spend whatever is happening to boost their career.
Speaker 1: If they were actually concerned about children, they wouldn't be
Speaker 1: having little giggle fests will inside events like the is
Speaker 1: right they call it a child grooming event, and they
Speaker 1: are not acting like there's anything bad happening, like you
Speaker 1: can say like, oh, they're trying to play cool because
Speaker 1: they're doing infiltration. Like no, they're just being chill like
Speaker 1: they're they're giggling and laughing and looking like look at
Speaker 1: this gay people doing these things. I can't wait to
Speaker 1: use footage of this to boost my career and misrepresented
Speaker 1: to a wider audience. We're in this like post irony
Speaker 1: world in many In many aspects, the level of sincerity
Speaker 1: does not actually matter, right. All it's necessary is saying
Speaker 1: the lines from the script that the audience wants to hear.
Speaker 1: It's like algorithmically generated politics. You can talk about how
Speaker 1: victims of sexual abuse should themselves be locked up so
Speaker 1: they won't go on to abuse of the people in
Speaker 1: the future, and even though you look at the camera
Speaker 1: at the end and give a knowing smirk, it doesn't
Speaker 1: matter because you're just saying the things that are gonna
Speaker 1: get traction, and you're saying the things that your misogynist
Speaker 1: audience wants to hear. Here's the turning point USA represent
Speaker 1: that of Isabelle Riley on the Blaze Media podcast, who
Speaker 1: at the end of the clip does indeed give a
Speaker 1: very knowing look to camera and a little smirk. Should
Speaker 1: we lock up people that I've had sexual Toronto in
Speaker 1: their childhood because they tend to become abusers in the future.
Speaker 1: Also just a few of their notes on this on
Speaker 1: this Blaze Media podcast. So I I listened to this
Speaker 1: whole podcast like twice to get to get clips for
Speaker 1: my coverage here and just to kind of get a
Speaker 1: sense of what they were doing. Um, what one of
Speaker 1: the speakers on the on the podcast blamed like the
Speaker 1: recent mass shootings on the presence of nearby sex shops. Um.
Speaker 1: Some of the videographers who were on the show went
Speaker 1: on to Alex Jones's show the next day. You know
Speaker 1: it was it was full of pretty I mean, it
Speaker 1: was pretty bad homophobic rhetoric, but I mean it's just
Speaker 1: so ever present that it's hard to even selectively get
Speaker 1: certain clips of it. Like they were doing a lot
Speaker 1: of work to to tie mental illness to gainness, saying
Speaker 1: that these two things were like intrinsically linked and that
Speaker 1: if we just locked up more into mentally ill people
Speaker 1: in institutions, we wouldn't have as many gay people. I think.
Speaker 1: The other interesting thing that I found to be really
Speaker 1: funny in the podcast is that for for their first
Speaker 1: ad break, they were selling testosterone boosting supplements. So in this,
Speaker 1: in this very like anti trans like podcast, the first
Speaker 1: product they were selling was supplements to boost your natural
Speaker 1: mail to stosterone. And it's just very funny because like
Speaker 1: they're you know, they're talking about how evil a turkey
Speaker 1: is and how evil and irreversible it is, and then
Speaker 1: they're also selling things that are supposed to boost testosterone levels. Right,
Speaker 1: like we are in a post iro any world. It
Speaker 1: doesn't like this anyway. Here's here's one more clip from
Speaker 1: the podcast, talking about how the bigoted community is so diverse,
Speaker 1: and you'll notice to our group was very dime verse,
Speaker 1: which I think we made this point yesterday as well.
Speaker 1: The bigoted community is so accepting. All you have to
Speaker 1: be is also bigoted, and you're allowed to hang out
Speaker 1: with us. And so we had this nice mob of
Speaker 1: well dressed, handsome young guys to go confront these people
Speaker 1: because no one else would. All right, that is that
Speaker 1: is enough of that um on onto our final section
Speaker 1: of the day, so Texas based journalist Stephen Moncelli reported
Speaker 1: that later that same night of the drag event, incidents
Speaker 1: that police categorized as terroristic threats of an anti homosexual
Speaker 1: nature were reported by bar owners in the same neighborhood.
Speaker 1: After the event, the venue and gay bar released a
Speaker 1: media statement saying that it's weekly drag brunches are normally
Speaker 1: for guests who are twenty one and over, but decided
Speaker 1: to host a special Pride drag brunch for all guests,
Speaker 1: including those who can't attend other drag shows because of
Speaker 1: the drinking age restrictions, and as a part to raise
Speaker 1: money for a local l g B t Q youth organization,
Speaker 1: adding that it was quote more than happy to open
Speaker 1: our doors to celebrate Pride in a family friendly, safe
Speaker 1: environment because we believe that everyone should have a space
Speaker 1: to be able to celebrate who they are. Unquote. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna I'm gonna read another quote from uh I think
Speaker 1: this is this is our last quote from Pizza Gate
Speaker 1: in every city, quote the street confrontation, to video, to
Speaker 1: Fox News to Republican Party. Pipeline took only a little
Speaker 1: more than two days to complete. By the next Monday,
Speaker 1: Texas Republicans state Representative Brian Slayton cited the Protect Texas
Speaker 1: Kids attack on the Dallas event in his announcement to
Speaker 1: introduce quote a bill to ban drag shows in the
Speaker 1: presence of miners in Texas unquote. A Florida state representative
Speaker 1: pledged to follow suit. US representatives Marjorie Taylor Green and
Speaker 1: Lauren Bobbert voiced their support. By then, Protect Texas Kids
Speaker 1: had already moved on to a new target, an lgbt
Speaker 1: Q affirming church that was having a service next to Sunday,
Speaker 1: and the group had already announced several more plans to
Speaker 1: protest LGBTQ spaces this month. What we are already seeing
Speaker 1: this Pride season is alarming, but it did not come
Speaker 1: out of nowhere. There's a continuation of campaigns targeting drag
Speaker 1: queen story hours. It was fed by Republican attacks on
Speaker 1: queer and trans kids in the state legislators across the country,
Speaker 1: and it is coordinated by people on the far right
Speaker 1: who have names and very specific movement affiliations. As these
Speaker 1: threats continue, as they generate yet more videos of confrontations,
Speaker 1: they may also give heft to the lie that supporting
Speaker 1: lgbt Q youth is grooming and that queer community spaces
Speaker 1: are commercial settings for child abuse. No Republican would say
Speaker 1: the Pizza Gate shooter had a point, but now simply
Speaker 1: based on videos of deliberate conversations with kids at Pride events,
Speaker 1: they're happy to co sign unquote. While make Is won't
Speaker 1: be able to consider a Slantin's proposal on a statewide
Speaker 1: band of kids being around drag performances until the tenth
Speaker 1: of January, which is when the next Texas legislative session
Speaker 1: kicks off. But if the no Drag around miners lug
Speaker 1: it's enacted, that could have many many ramifications depending on enforcement.
Speaker 1: One possible scenario is not being allowed to have dray
Speaker 1: get Pride, or people under the age of eighteen just
Speaker 1: not being allowed to attend Pride all right, because those
Speaker 1: if you're having a Pride Pride and the drike performers
Speaker 1: and the kids there, now that's a crying You're all
Speaker 1: going to jail. Um. You could also just see this
Speaker 1: as an attempt by Texas to recriminalize cross dressing, because
Speaker 1: by and large, drag shows and events are usually taking
Speaker 1: place at twenty one and up bars. Right, generally unless
Speaker 1: it's the drag time storytime stuff like drags not around
Speaker 1: kids super often, right, and including like very like non
Speaker 1: sexual dragons. That's just because of because of how laws
Speaker 1: work around bars us. Usually those things don't have much crossover.
Speaker 1: But that's not what they're targeting though, right. They just
Speaker 1: don't want gay people or men in dresses to be
Speaker 1: around kids. Right. If you're seeing cross dressing while a
Speaker 1: child is nearby, now that's a drag show. You're going
Speaker 1: to jail. And if you think a ban on quote
Speaker 1: drag in front of children won't be applied to just
Speaker 1: trans people existing in public, then again, I don't know
Speaker 1: what to tell you because depending on how they define
Speaker 1: what drag is like, they're not limiting this to like
Speaker 1: drag shows. They're talking about men in dresses like that.
Speaker 1: That's that's what it's going to be. Because they're targeting
Speaker 1: library events, they're targeting events in public. It's not it's
Speaker 1: not about like drag shows with tickets and stuff. It's
Speaker 1: about men wearing dresses or you know, in the in
Speaker 1: the case the trans people just existing. Here here's the
Speaker 1: Helm of Public Avengers talking about the introduced legislation after
Speaker 1: their little propaganda campaign. But wow, the guys, we really
Speaker 1: did and I'm not trying to pat ourselves on the back,
Speaker 1: but which Brian Slaton with the legislation he's trying to
Speaker 1: put through exposing these people. We really did take a
Speaker 1: wt in the culture battle. We didn't win the culture warrior.
Speaker 1: I don't think I've ever seen such enough I mean
Speaker 1: an after effect of an event. I mean in positivity
Speaker 1: for us. I mean, I don't think I've ever seen,
Speaker 1: you know, a bunch of journalists go and expose an
Speaker 1: event like this and then have actual legislation drafted almost
Speaker 1: immediately after. I think this is a new sphere that
Speaker 1: we're entering in, and I think, I mean, we got
Speaker 1: a freaking role with Yeah. I really hope that the
Speaker 1: momentum is maintained. To close off I'm gonna I'm gonna
Speaker 1: riff off a point made by Stephen Moncelli. At what
Speaker 1: point will become clear to those in media who run
Speaker 1: quotes or use selective footage from these people that intentionally
Speaker 1: obscure the extreme nature of their beliefs. Right, These these
Speaker 1: are not like simple economic conservatives. However, if contemporary mainstream
Speaker 1: conservatives are willing to accept this sort of politics in
Speaker 1: their movement. Then it's the case that mainstream conservatism in
Speaker 1: America has become almost indistinguishable from fascism. Much of the
Speaker 1: coverage of the protest of this Pride event gives credibility
Speaker 1: to the fascist side, basically endorsing their homophobic framing, positioning
Speaker 1: the drag performers as somehow inherently sexual for wearing them
Speaker 1: outfits and doing dances that are in reality more conservative
Speaker 1: than your basic high school cheerleading team. Mainstream media and pundance,
Speaker 1: and even some leftist ones quote like quote unquote leftist
Speaker 1: pundance fell for the bait and treated kids playing musical
Speaker 1: chairs with people in drag and giving the performers cash
Speaker 1: from their parents as more inappropriate than the mob of
Speaker 1: open fascists hurling verbal abuse at kids and chasing them
Speaker 1: down as they head to their cars. So that is
Speaker 1: my little right up on what has happened in dal
Speaker 1: Us last week. Um, they are the Protect Texas Kids
Speaker 1: group is planning more and more events in Texas for
Speaker 1: for four Pride months. It's they're they're they're they're targeting
Speaker 1: not just events with kids, they're also targeting twenty one
Speaker 1: and up drag brunches. They're targeting churches. They're doing the
Speaker 1: bit right there doing the thing, and people really fell
Speaker 1: for the bait on this one. People really did. Um.
Speaker 1: If I've seen all of the videos from the events,
Speaker 1: there's nothing inherently sexual about these people's style of dancing,
Speaker 1: there's nothing inherently sexual about their outfits. Right, playing with
Speaker 1: gender isn't inherently sexual. It's playing with gender. It's these
Speaker 1: are those are two different things. Um so, but yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot of a lot of people
Speaker 1: fell fell for the bit um. A lot of people
Speaker 1: took the bait. We're sharing photos and being like, look this,
Speaker 1: how can you defend this? So, like defend what it's
Speaker 1: people dancing you would see, you would see it's it's
Speaker 1: the dances are not like, they're not about sex, they're
Speaker 1: not imitating sex acts. It's just it's fun and chill. Um.
Speaker 1: People got really mad at there was there was a
Speaker 1: sign at the at the venue that was an innuendo,
Speaker 1: and there's a ice cream shop like a block away
Speaker 1: from the venue with the very same sign. Um, they're
Speaker 1: not actually mad about that, Like, that's not what they're
Speaker 1: actually mad about. Because you can walk down the street
Speaker 1: and look at so many, so many things. They're innuendoes
Speaker 1: if you want, if you watch a Pixar movie right there,
Speaker 1: there will there will be anuendos. That's not what they're
Speaker 1: talking about. They're talking about gay people being around kids,
Speaker 1: and I would like for people to stop falling for debate. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I'm we're gonna be doing another episode on the City
Speaker 1: of Hate, on the homophobook stuff in Dallas later later
Speaker 1: this week, and we're gonna be talking about Steadfast Church.
Speaker 1: I'm still writing that episode at the moment, but I'm
Speaker 1: planning to put that out later this week as well.
Speaker 1: And depending how the Gunderline event went to Idaho and
Speaker 1: the various other things, I'm sure we'll be talking more
Speaker 1: about this type of stuff as as Pride goes on.
Speaker 1: So yeah, Chris, any thoughts on the word vomit? I
Speaker 1: just gave it for the past forty minutes, you know,
Speaker 1: and mostly just like I don't know, it's it's we.
Speaker 1: We We've somehow managed to create a version of like
Speaker 1: the like worst at parts of like the queer Bashing
Speaker 1: two thousand's, but like even worse, because now there's there's
Speaker 1: an even larger media cycle around it, And like, I
Speaker 1: think it's worth mentioning that, like one of the ways
Speaker 1: that stuff ended was that like a lot of people,
Speaker 1: most of them would were like like systons, straight right people,
Speaker 1: a bunch of people who weren't queer. We're just like
Speaker 1: literally fucked this and started attacking people back. And you know,
Speaker 1: you see the working clas neighborhoods right there. There'd be
Speaker 1: a period of time where you have these evangelical churches
Speaker 1: who are just you know, like openly insiding attacks on
Speaker 1: people until they got the ship beat out of them
Speaker 1: by a bunch of working class kids. And that's when
Speaker 1: that ship stopped. And unless we fucking fight these people,
Speaker 1: they're going to keep doing this until people start getting murdered.
Speaker 1: And I guess I know a more positiing to end
Speaker 1: on would be saying big thank you to everyone who
Speaker 1: showed up to physically oppose this. UM. When I was
Speaker 1: listening to the Homophobic Avengers podcast, John Doyle said that
Speaker 1: there was a few points where he was scared. Um.
Speaker 1: There were some people who some some people wearing like
Speaker 1: pride bandanas and stuff who had handguns, um, and he
Speaker 1: did not John Doyle did not like that. At one
Speaker 1: point he talked about how he was heading to his
Speaker 1: car and there was in the counter the counter demonstrators
Speaker 1: were following him to make sure he was actually going
Speaker 1: to leave UM and he saw that some of the
Speaker 1: people were carrying UM and he freaked out. He screamed
Speaker 1: for police, and he's said that these people were threatening
Speaker 1: to shoot him, UM, which is mean, just an attempt
Speaker 1: to get police to shoot the Canadas traders, right, like
Speaker 1: it's it's it's it's just it's John Doyle screaming. These
Speaker 1: people have guns, They're trying to shoot me, right And
Speaker 1: even though they were, they weren't even holding their guns.
Speaker 1: They were they were they were they were just having guns.
Speaker 1: But like, these people can't be scared. And again, no
Speaker 1: one was even violent against John Doyle. That was just
Speaker 1: people who were who were carrying standing near him UM.
Speaker 1: And I just big thank you to everybody who showed
Speaker 1: up to try to prevent these fascists from chasing down
Speaker 1: these kids, from hurling abuse at these kids. UM. I
Speaker 1: would recommend you follow uh the elm Fork John Brown
Speaker 1: Gun Club on Twitter. They did a really good job
Speaker 1: documenting this UM and then for the stuff in Idaho,
Speaker 1: you can follow Redoubt anti fascists. Um, those those would
Speaker 1: be the two the two people I say to follow
Speaker 1: on Twitter right now. Um for attracting these attacks on
Speaker 1: pride in Texas and inside Idaho. Um, I guess that's
Speaker 1: that's think. Yeah, yeah, I guess The last thing I
Speaker 1: would say is just like it's important to remember that
Speaker 1: unlike a lot of the periods in queer history, like
Speaker 1: these people are actually a minority, and and like they're
Speaker 1: trying to regress, right, like they we've already got to
Speaker 1: this point, they're trying to pull it back. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is kind of a new thing, but it's like but yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's like listening, like we like on unlike the
Speaker 1: fucking seventies, Like we are actually the solent majority here
Speaker 1: and if enough people fucking show up, And just like
Speaker 1: these people need to be framed as Yeah, I excuse
Speaker 1: my I guess semi ablest language here, but like I
Speaker 1: deal with my ideal, mental ideal, with mental health issues
Speaker 1: of my own, but like, these people need need to
Speaker 1: be framed as whack ups, right they these people need
Speaker 1: need to be framed as frames. These people need to
Speaker 1: be framed as as crazy extremists. They need they need
Speaker 1: to be belittled, they need to be put down, They
Speaker 1: need to be they need to be viewed as as
Speaker 1: as as pathetic as is scared, right like that, that's
Speaker 1: the way to do successful proprianda framing, um, because they
Speaker 1: need to be they need to stay outside the majority,
Speaker 1: right like, they need to be mothered. That's the way
Speaker 1: to win this, right that That's the thing they always
Speaker 1: That's the thing they always try to do, right, That's
Speaker 1: why they always try to frame gay people as being
Speaker 1: severely mentally ill a the time, right like that. That
Speaker 1: that's all what they try to do. And because enough
Speaker 1: of progress has happened, we we just need to defend
Speaker 1: the line that is already drawn because like like I
Speaker 1: said before, right like, these people are not regular economic conservatives,
Speaker 1: right but if mainstream and conservatism is going to be
Speaker 1: is cont is going to continue to accept this politics
Speaker 1: in their movement, then mainstream conservatism will be the same
Speaker 1: as fascism. Right. So you need to point at the
Speaker 1: people like John Doyle, point at the people who call
Speaker 1: themselves Christian fascists and be so demeaning to them, um
Speaker 1: and so making them feel so separate from every part
Speaker 1: of regular social life, and because their whole goals to
Speaker 1: integrate themselves into the larger conservative movement, integrate themselves into
Speaker 1: larger American politics, and that can't happen. Welcome to it
Speaker 1: could happen? Here a podcast where you all keep telling
Speaker 1: me that we keep doing depressing episodes and we never
Speaker 1: do any episodes that aren't dumerism. So today this is
Speaker 1: a podcast about how you can find the people who
Speaker 1: are making your life really bad and make bad things
Speaker 1: happen to them instead. And with me to talk about
Speaker 1: how this has been done and also can be done,
Speaker 1: is Janet you, who is a tenant organizer with the
Speaker 1: Chinatown Community for Equitable Development in l A. And on
Speaker 1: here's another tenant organizer and leader at Northside Villa um A. Janis,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for joining us. Thank you Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's Hillside VideA not sorry, no way. So this
Speaker 1: is what happens when I have m R I brand.
Speaker 1: I guess okay, So the first thing I want to
Speaker 1: sort of walk through is basically, can can can you
Speaker 1: describe the win you all had a couple of weeks ago? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can go ahead and start and then and I
Speaker 1: if you want to fill in at all UM. So
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks ago we were able to successfully
Speaker 1: push our city council to approve alone to acquire Hillside
Speaker 1: Viea from slum lord Tom Bots. And so just to
Speaker 1: make it clear, this isn't the end of the fight.
Speaker 1: We have not fully appropriated tom Bots at the moment,
Speaker 1: but this is a huge victory and commitment from the
Speaker 1: city to take the building from him. So it was
Speaker 1: really really exciting for all of us. You know. I
Speaker 1: guess one thing I want to clarify from the outset
Speaker 1: is that a lot of the reporting about it seemed
Speaker 1: like a lot of the reporting about it was saying
Speaker 1: that the city had had voted to use eminent domain
Speaker 1: and they have not done that, which is my understanding. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So to clarify that part two the motion that was
Speaker 1: past it does include that eminent domain will be used
Speaker 1: if the landlord does not willingly sell, which he most
Speaker 1: likely will not of course, yeah exactly, so he's not
Speaker 1: going to will and he sell his building. It does
Speaker 1: include that it will be used and as part of
Speaker 1: the pathway, um, but it does not specifically past the
Speaker 1: eminent domain piece, so that will be something that we
Speaker 1: will probably have to organize around. Um. Yeah, and if
Speaker 1: I'm understanding correctly, then understand that that requires a second vote,
Speaker 1: right M yeah, yeah, but I guess okay, first off, also, congratulations,
Speaker 1: this rules us really exciting. Um yeah, And I guess
Speaker 1: the second thing I wanted to ask about was how
Speaker 1: how this organizing process started and how are you able
Speaker 1: to do this because this is a this is a
Speaker 1: rare massive w that yeah mm hmm. Yeah, so this
Speaker 1: has been a three year struggle, um, and I can
Speaker 1: give a little bit of context around how how it
Speaker 1: got started and then Mediana you can take it from there. UM.
Speaker 1: So basically, Hillside Via is part of a massive amount
Speaker 1: of buildings that were built in the eighties, UM using
Speaker 1: different kinds of federal and state subsidies. UM. And basically yeah,
Speaker 1: it was UM subsidies that were used to fund private
Speaker 1: developers to keep buildings affordable for a temporary period of time,
Speaker 1: so using affordable housing covenants. And so Hillside covenant expired
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen after thirty years of being kept affordable
Speaker 1: for the tenants. And as soon as that happened, UM,
Speaker 1: the landlord of course tried to increase the rent to
Speaker 1: market rate, So folks were receiving up to two rent increases.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm yeah, so you know to actually like talk
Speaker 1: about what those numbers are. People who are paying eight
Speaker 1: hundred dollars for rent were now being asked to pay liked.
Speaker 1: So that's a de facto eviction, right, And um, as
Speaker 1: soon as that happened, there's actually this like origin story
Speaker 1: that I really love is that one of our tenant leaders, Leslie,
Speaker 1: who's uh bilingual like Spanish and English speaker, she came
Speaker 1: up to a tenant who is a modelingual Cantonese speaker,
Speaker 1: held up one of the rent increases, ripped it to shreds,
Speaker 1: and the Benson, our Cantonese tenant leader, just said okay.
Speaker 1: And that's like one of the origin stories that really
Speaker 1: just shows like how um yeah, like opposite and all
Speaker 1: our tenants were from the beginning. Um. And then what
Speaker 1: happened was that another tenant leader, Louisa, who actually has
Speaker 1: since passed away due to COVID, she actually called all
Speaker 1: the news stations in l A just blew this the
Speaker 1: funk up and um yeah, and then that's how organizers
Speaker 1: kind of got involved and maybe and I you can
Speaker 1: share your personal experience of going through all of this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: for sure. UM so about right a little before the
Speaker 1: association was started at Hillside Villa, UM, we had been
Speaker 1: living here for about seven years and at that time,
Speaker 1: UM So, I was working with my mom at the time,
Speaker 1: and we went out um in the morning for work.
Speaker 1: We came back around the afternoon, UM to find that
Speaker 1: we couldn't get into our apartment. Our keys were actually um,
Speaker 1: they weren't going into the locks. So we went to
Speaker 1: the manager's office and asked them, like why our key
Speaker 1: wasn't working. So they sent management up to our our
Speaker 1: floor and UM they told us that we had been
Speaker 1: evicted and that we couldn't like go back and yeah,
Speaker 1: that we couldn't go back into our apartment. UM. So
Speaker 1: it's just just within that one that one morning, you know,
Speaker 1: our whole pretty much our whole life was like flipped
Speaker 1: upside down. UM. They told us that they actually worked
Speaker 1: unfortunately with them, and I think this is a very
Speaker 1: common UM thing, is that UM landlords UM work directly
Speaker 1: with the Sheriff's department. So the sheriff department came and
Speaker 1: switched out our lock. UM. So we were pretty much uprooted. UM.
Speaker 1: That day, UM, we had to figure out like what
Speaker 1: to do. UM, we were all set brated, like that day,
Speaker 1: we all, you know, my sister went to her friend's house,
Speaker 1: my mom had to go rent a hotel to stay
Speaker 1: with UM her husband, and then I went to my
Speaker 1: partner's house. So that lasted about two to three days.
Speaker 1: And in those two to three days, we were personally.
Speaker 1: I started looking up tenant laws, tenant rights, and we
Speaker 1: found thanks to to a friend, UM, she recommended the
Speaker 1: Eviction Defense Network, who provides UM free lawyers for UM
Speaker 1: tenants facing UM eviction in l A. So they heard
Speaker 1: us up with a lawyer and UM they found that UM,
Speaker 1: the eviction had actually been an illegal eviction. And then
Speaker 1: we all we also had like the paperwork to show
Speaker 1: that that it was an illegal eviction. So UM we
Speaker 1: threatened to sue UM the landlord and because of that,
Speaker 1: he dropped the case and us back in to our
Speaker 1: apartment after like three or four days or something like
Speaker 1: that from what I can remember, UM, but in those
Speaker 1: days it was it was really enraging obviously, like who
Speaker 1: wouldn't be like super piste off at this, like it
Speaker 1: would boil your blood you know, and and it did. UM.
Speaker 1: And that's one of the things that like, UM kind
Speaker 1: of made me um or very much so more involved
Speaker 1: in like tenant rights and and UM organizing. UM. And
Speaker 1: then also like just to throw this in a little
Speaker 1: more detail, UM, when we were locked out, UM, they
Speaker 1: actually locked our animals in in c the apartment, so
Speaker 1: we couldn't even get our dogs right away. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: did they like were they okay? Like did you were
Speaker 1: able to like was anyone feeding them? Like they weren't
Speaker 1: there all the three days I think we were. We
Speaker 1: had to like really like push for them to open
Speaker 1: up the apartment so that we can get them, like
Speaker 1: the day of UM. But then like we couldn't just
Speaker 1: like grab all our things, UM, including like medication that
Speaker 1: was like for my mom's husband who has diabetes and whatnot.
Speaker 1: So I think that was like the first time we
Speaker 1: acted as a family to like not let um someone
Speaker 1: pretty much bully and harass us into a forced eviction
Speaker 1: that was completely illegal. UM. And that's within that time.
Speaker 1: It was also happening to all the tenants around us.
Speaker 1: I mean there was the word was going all over
Speaker 1: the apartment. I mean you you could see management was
Speaker 1: doing a cash for keys um, which is also an
Speaker 1: illegal tactic for UM landlords to do. And UM they
Speaker 1: were trying Yeah, UM, so cash for keys UM. It's
Speaker 1: probably going to be like a rough definition of what
Speaker 1: it is, but it's when UM, when a landlord offers
Speaker 1: a certain amount of money in order for you to
Speaker 1: give up your apartment UM. And this could be a
Speaker 1: couple of thousand, UM, ten thousand, twenty thousand, sometimes way
Speaker 1: less than that. UM. So that was a tactic that
Speaker 1: he was trying to use to evict people from our
Speaker 1: apartment so that he could remodel and then UM move
Speaker 1: it up to like market rate and get pretty much
Speaker 1: all of our community out of this apartment, which was
Speaker 1: an affordable apartment. UM. It worked for a lot of
Speaker 1: some tenants did end up doing that. A lot of
Speaker 1: people didn't want to fight back UM, but the one
Speaker 1: that did UM started the association UM. And there's also
Speaker 1: a lot of like language barriers with the tenants UM,
Speaker 1: some that only spoke Spanish and didn't understand what was happening.
Speaker 1: They were trying to get people to sign contracts UM
Speaker 1: for for the increase of the rent UM. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: that was my experience here to begin with um and
Speaker 1: and why we decided to fight back and not allow
Speaker 1: this to to happen to our family, but also like
Speaker 1: our community here who were also experiencing the same thing.
Speaker 1: You know, it wasn't just an ice. I say this
Speaker 1: all the time. It felt like an isolated situation at
Speaker 1: the time, but it on the broader perspective, it was
Speaker 1: not an isolated thing. And that's what brought our community together.
Speaker 1: That's a really powerful being, doably enraging. And yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of really interesting things they're like, I mean, one, obviously,
Speaker 1: the cops doing like the sheriff's like helping them do
Speaker 1: the illegal eviction is just incredibly on the nose. And
Speaker 1: the one thing I think is really interesting about the
Speaker 1: way that like I mean, okay, the the way the
Speaker 1: law only exists for rich people if you can like
Speaker 1: throw it into their faces and make it embarrassing enough
Speaker 1: that like the state has to enforce it. So I
Speaker 1: read a lot of media coverage of this, and not
Speaker 1: a single person who who covered the story that that
Speaker 1: that I saw from these articles mentioned that the that
Speaker 1: cash for keys is illegal a lot because a lot
Speaker 1: of the articles mentioned it, but they don't they don't.
Speaker 1: They don't mention that like you legally can't do this,
Speaker 1: and so yeah, I think that's a that that that's
Speaker 1: I don't know, I guess it goes to show that
Speaker 1: like even among the press, like whose job it is
Speaker 1: to do this, there's there's such like little there's such
Speaker 1: a little knowledge of what what what practices aren't and
Speaker 1: are and aren't allowed, and that Yeah, I mean I
Speaker 1: think as you're talking about like that, that that that's one
Speaker 1: of the they're they're relying like in order to do this,
Speaker 1: suff landlords are like, yeah, that they're they're relying on
Speaker 1: people not knowing the rights to relying on being able
Speaker 1: to trick people. They're relying on just straight up handing
Speaker 1: people stuff they can't read and forcing them to sign it,
Speaker 1: which I don't know that my brain is weird, But
Speaker 1: like the thing that reminds me of is like that
Speaker 1: the Spanish conquistadors showing up and then really like ask
Speaker 1: asking people to convert to Christianity in Spanish language they
Speaker 1: didn't speak, and then shooting them when they didn't do it.
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, that's a fitting analogy. Honestly. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a new form of colonization and one that we're you know, resisting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: yea that that was one of the other things I
Speaker 1: wanted to talk about in terms of resisting this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff is Yeah, what what was it like dealing
Speaker 1: with the kind of anguage barriers that you get here?
Speaker 1: What you have? I don't know, Like, I mean, you've
Speaker 1: mentioned like at least three languages that people are speaking.
Speaker 1: There's probably more because that's just that's how working class
Speaker 1: communities work. Mm hmm. Yeah. I feel like that's been
Speaker 1: such a central part of our fight, is language justice
Speaker 1: and the tenant meetings that we've had every single week
Speaker 1: for the past three years. Um, so that's like about
Speaker 1: a hundred and fifteen meetings. Every single one of them
Speaker 1: has included some form of translation. Um. So yeah, we've
Speaker 1: had a lot of support from folks from Union Davos organizers.
Speaker 1: There have gear where we can do like simultaneous translation. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So if you go to one of our meetings, it's
Speaker 1: folks who, um, if they're modelingual Spanish or English speakers,
Speaker 1: they're having a headset on where we then have someone
Speaker 1: who's offering simultaneous translation. Um. And then since we have
Speaker 1: few Cantonese or Mandarin speakers will also have organizers on
Speaker 1: the side doing UM consecutive translation for them. So our
Speaker 1: meetings are run and like usually three if not more
Speaker 1: languages M and I guess, I guess. It leads into
Speaker 1: another question that I had, which was, so, how how
Speaker 1: did I think from my understanding this on one of
Speaker 1: the parts of the story is like, is people who
Speaker 1: people who have been doing established tenant organizing like getting
Speaker 1: getting involved with the struggle, And I wanted to, I guess,
Speaker 1: talk about how that happens. And yeah, yeah, yeah, So
Speaker 1: I think because that original tenant, Louisa like really blew
Speaker 1: this story up. UM different orbs heard about it, and
Speaker 1: eventually UM LAT too, so the l A Tenants Union
Speaker 1: and then c c D UM, the organ that I'm in,
Speaker 1: we heard about it and got involved long term. And
Speaker 1: even with that, like I'm a relatively new organizer, I
Speaker 1: only started volunteering with CCD a couple of years ago,
Speaker 1: so it's really been like one of my first UM
Speaker 1: site fights we like to call them. But there are
Speaker 1: other folks who have had more a bit more experience
Speaker 1: with different buildings in l A as well. But I
Speaker 1: think what's important to emphasize is that this fight has
Speaker 1: really been tenant lead um, and even though we have
Speaker 1: like these kind of yeah outside organizers, it's always been
Speaker 1: the tenants demands and the tenants interests first. Yeah. It
Speaker 1: seems I mean, you know, from from your descriptionships like
Speaker 1: people showing up a translation equipment. Yeah, it seems like
Speaker 1: a really good way to do this kind of stuff,
Speaker 1: which is you show up and you give help to people,
Speaker 1: but it's it's you know, it's it's them doing the organizing,
Speaker 1: which I don't know, reminds me a lot of like,
Speaker 1: I mean, my experiences in union organizing stuff, which is like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, it's it's some Yeah, like you have people
Speaker 1: who experience with stuff and they come in and their
Speaker 1: job is to help the people who are actually trying
Speaker 1: to organize the place. Mm hmm yeah exactly exactly, the
Speaker 1: people who are like actually directly impacted. Um. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: feel like our role has really just been facilitating, offering
Speaker 1: like the technical support, um more of that stuff. But
Speaker 1: I think you can really talk about how so much
Speaker 1: of this fight has really been building the tenant's power
Speaker 1: and becoming more and more like militant um and radical
Speaker 1: and just the tenants like yeah, really most definitely feeling
Speaker 1: their own fire. Yeah. So we are like super duper
Speaker 1: grateful for the UM organizers that have come out for
Speaker 1: the last three years or however long UM they've decided
Speaker 1: to or have joined the association to help UM and
Speaker 1: a lot of the tenants always always like give things
Speaker 1: and they're super appreciative or the organizers, But sometimes they
Speaker 1: don't give themselves the credit either. They think it's only
Speaker 1: like they think the organizers, which is obviously like super
Speaker 1: important and we're super grateful, but they don't realize that
Speaker 1: they're a huge part of of the fight. UM. For example, UM,
Speaker 1: actually my mom UH has been a part of the
Speaker 1: association for longer than I have. UM. I've only been
Speaker 1: organizing for about UM well not only UM a year
Speaker 1: and a half, but she's actually been in the organization
Speaker 1: for three years UM because not only because she needed
Speaker 1: the support and the organizers really helped to UM to
Speaker 1: guide her to like learn to use her voice for
Speaker 1: UM for the outcome that we all want to see. UM.
Speaker 1: And a lot of the tenants are UM are women,
Speaker 1: their elders, you know, their generation elders, so UM, they're
Speaker 1: very strong people they UM a lot of like the
Speaker 1: elder like UM like I guess Latina, I don't know
Speaker 1: how I feel about that term. But UM, you know,
Speaker 1: women UM are our natural leaders, and with the help
Speaker 1: of the organizers, UM, they really just helped to to
Speaker 1: help them too, you know, use their voice and to
Speaker 1: empower them to to do what they can naturally do,
Speaker 1: which is speak up and ask for what they want. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: my mom is learned over the last three years how
Speaker 1: to talk in front of politicians, how to UM communicate
Speaker 1: the process and the struggle that we've all been enduring,
Speaker 1: but to also demand what we rightfully deserve, which is housing,
Speaker 1: safe housing, and for politicians to do their job, which
Speaker 1: is to represent as they should be the community that
Speaker 1: they are working for and not and you know, not
Speaker 1: to beg them to do things, but to demand that
Speaker 1: um they take action in the way that we have
Speaker 1: taken action UM, much more than than any politician has
Speaker 1: in the last three years. UM. It was up to
Speaker 1: the tenants and it still is and thanks to them
Speaker 1: we have gotten as far as we have. That That
Speaker 1: was that was yeah, really well said. I want to
Speaker 1: I guess shift a little bit into talking about like
Speaker 1: what specifically y'all were doing because I guess I guess
Speaker 1: both that is like what how how how how did
Speaker 1: you actually do this? And then how can other people
Speaker 1: sort of like how can other people replicate it? Mm hmm, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know that we necessarily have like a model,
Speaker 1: UM that other people can apply, because I think reflecting
Speaker 1: about this whole fight, it was such a like just
Speaker 1: dynamic campaign where at first when it started, UM folks
Speaker 1: war kind of using more you know, like legal tactics,
Speaker 1: just like looking for errors in UM the rent increases
Speaker 1: that bots would hand out and this would you know,
Speaker 1: lead to UM being able to stall the rent hikes
Speaker 1: for months at a time. UM. But then that obviously
Speaker 1: wasn't enough, so then people started escalating and UM eventually
Speaker 1: like putting pressure to get this on the radar of
Speaker 1: our districts, like city council person Gil Cudeo, And eventually,
Speaker 1: through that, UM they were able to get Cudeo to
Speaker 1: make a deal with the landlord to extend the covenant
Speaker 1: UM and have his clan spe his debt beat forgiven. UM.
Speaker 1: But the landlord just like renegged on that deal, right,
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, so then UM, I think it's through
Speaker 1: those experiences that the tenants really learned like Okay, it's
Speaker 1: like this politician is not going to save us. Um.
Speaker 1: So then I think our fight became more and more militant,
Speaker 1: so just directly going to the landlords Malibu Villa and
Speaker 1: shouting like fuck you, and you know, just like yeah,
Speaker 1: just like those direct confrontations. And then even Sidio himself
Speaker 1: UM has not been you know, this friendly relationship where
Speaker 1: we're thanking him for putting our putting our story into
Speaker 1: city council. It's been extremely confrontational and oppositional the entire time.
Speaker 1: And I think thinking about what got us this recent
Speaker 1: when it was um as it has been this whole
Speaker 1: fight direct action, because we ended up the first day
Speaker 1: that city Council opened up to the public again, a
Speaker 1: group of us went in kind of like slid our
Speaker 1: way through security and went to his office and surprisingly
Speaker 1: he opened the door um and it was him and
Speaker 1: not a staffer, and of course he saw it was us,
Speaker 1: so he immediately tried to close the door, and one
Speaker 1: of our amazing tenant leaders, Rosario, who's yeah, this elder
Speaker 1: um Latino woman, she stuck her foot in the door
Speaker 1: and refused to let him close it. Yeah, and because
Speaker 1: of that, we were able to just like directly confront
Speaker 1: him like, where the funk have you been? It's been
Speaker 1: three years, um, and you haven't seen this through like
Speaker 1: you said you were going to. And we got all that,
Speaker 1: you know, UM, recorded video evidence of him UM just yeah,
Speaker 1: fumbling around, and he sent the cops on us of course. UM.
Speaker 1: And Yeah, I think that was such a great action
Speaker 1: because all of the we call them like the muhera,
Speaker 1: so the Latino women who have been leading the fight,
Speaker 1: they were just so defiant towards the cops. UM, not
Speaker 1: scared at all, and just you know, standing their ground
Speaker 1: and that they're just defending you know, they're human right
Speaker 1: to housing. UM. And a week after that confrontational action,
Speaker 1: we got this, UM, this city council motion passed. So,
Speaker 1: you know, I think from our experience trying to go
Speaker 1: through the NXT way and like you know, doing traditional lobbying,
Speaker 1: trying to schedule meetings and like texting, calling all of that,
Speaker 1: things didn't happen for years. And then we did more
Speaker 1: and more militant actions, things happened really quickly. Yeah. Another
Speaker 1: thing I'd like to add on to that, UM that
Speaker 1: I actually heard was something that not a lot of
Speaker 1: UM other associations UM that are fighting for their housing
Speaker 1: UM do often was UM to bring the community together, UM.
Speaker 1: And like I mean really coming together. I mean we're
Speaker 1: meeting every week for the last three years, and even
Speaker 1: during the pandemic, UM we weren't in person. We actually
Speaker 1: were on zoom for a really long time. UM. And
Speaker 1: that's one of the biggest things, was UM the consistency
Speaker 1: that we all pushed through even during the pandemic. UM
Speaker 1: from the beginning was meeting every single week, and some
Speaker 1: other UM organizers also meet more than once a week.
Speaker 1: You know, we're meeting multiple times a week too, kind
Speaker 1: of talk over like the fine detail of of you know,
Speaker 1: the next steps UM. But definitely consistency has been one
Speaker 1: of the biggest things in the last three years that
Speaker 1: has gotten us where we are today. Yeah, that that
Speaker 1: makes a lot of sense. It's I know, I keep
Speaker 1: going back to this because this is the sort of
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess I did some tenant organizing, but UM,
Speaker 1: this is the thing that I know now. Was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it reminds me a lot of just like the way
Speaker 1: the way the union campaigns that work run of just
Speaker 1: you have to keep you have you have to keep
Speaker 1: getting people together to do the thing. Yeah, most definitely. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't know have you all seen like like how
Speaker 1: how did that change, like your relationship with just like
Speaker 1: the other people in the building. I'll give you an
Speaker 1: example from like my mom. I think for her it's
Speaker 1: been changed a little more drastically than it has for
Speaker 1: me because a lot of the tenants here a little older. UM.
Speaker 1: So before the association was started, she she's kind of
Speaker 1: like a person that keeps to herself a lot, you know. Um,
Speaker 1: but since that, um, since the association, she's actually made
Speaker 1: like so many friends here now, like and she's actually
Speaker 1: made like a best friend here, um, one of our neighbors.
Speaker 1: And they like, yes, and they've become like really good friends. Um.
Speaker 1: They even go, you know, have breakfast together, um like
Speaker 1: almost multiple times a week. Um. The other day I
Speaker 1: saw them, Like I saw my mom's best friend Adelita
Speaker 1: or Adela, um giving her some sugar, and I was
Speaker 1: like I should have gotten a picture of that, Like
Speaker 1: that's you know, that's so cute, like posted it on
Speaker 1: like Instagram so that you know, like everyone knows like
Speaker 1: what it looks like when community comes together. It's it's
Speaker 1: the small things like that. UM. But I think it
Speaker 1: has UM made some you know who made us gain
Speaker 1: like trust with UM the neighbors that have been consistent
Speaker 1: UM and see the same UM kind of vision that
Speaker 1: we have to keep this building affordable. UM. And yeah,
Speaker 1: not everyone, not all the tenants here have been supportive
Speaker 1: of our fight. Some you know, participated for a few
Speaker 1: months and then immediately gave up. UM. But one of
Speaker 1: the things that UM that my family has done is
Speaker 1: to keep fighting UM, even for the ones that don't
Speaker 1: want to show up or don't want to do the work,
Speaker 1: which is how to work. UM. That we're not just
Speaker 1: doing it for ourselves, but we're doing it for for everyone,
Speaker 1: whether they're supportive or not. You know, this is going
Speaker 1: to benefit them and it's going to benefit the whole
Speaker 1: community and hopefully the city, the whole city in the future.
Speaker 1: I don't know, It's something I've definitely seen with organizing,
Speaker 1: is that like, yeah, just living in this world can
Speaker 1: be really isolating and I don't know, like I've lived
Speaker 1: in a lot of places where it's just like, yeah,
Speaker 1: like I have no idea who any like literally who
Speaker 1: anyone who lives around me is like like there's still
Speaker 1: they'll they'll be like the one person you see at
Speaker 1: three in the morning coming back to their apartment and
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, I vaguely remember this person, but like, yeah,
Speaker 1: like I think, I don't know, just this this being
Speaker 1: something that just on a broad level, not just about
Speaker 1: like I mean, you know, is it like this is
Speaker 1: something that's a solution to both like an immediate fight
Speaker 1: and then also this sort of like broader just I
Speaker 1: don't know, like Nightmaror's isolation that everyone's everyone like is
Speaker 1: a huge part of a lot of our lives. Now,
Speaker 1: I don't know. That's just struck me. I guess yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like this just makes me think of UM.
Speaker 1: To celebrate the recent win, we had this party at
Speaker 1: Hillside UM just last week, and you know, it was
Speaker 1: like Pollock style. Everyone brought their own food. UM. Someone
Speaker 1: had a connection with like a Mariachi van, so we
Speaker 1: had mariachi playing. UM. One of the tenants owns a
Speaker 1: food truck and just wanted to cook for the community.
Speaker 1: So she's whipping up these like amazing tacos and bag
Speaker 1: enough hot dogs. And then someone had brought this pinata
Speaker 1: of the landlord and people were just like talking just
Speaker 1: showing it. Like one of the tenants he was just
Speaker 1: like fist fighting it and cracking it open. The kids
Speaker 1: were just like grabbing as much candy as they could
Speaker 1: from this broken tom Bots Panada, and and like, I
Speaker 1: feel like that was just like exemplifies the sense of
Speaker 1: community that there is now Hillside. And I think, as
Speaker 1: Anna was talking about, those personal connections have been so
Speaker 1: key to keeping this fight going for three years because
Speaker 1: it's hard. It's so hard to keep showing up, and
Speaker 1: it's those personal connections that keep you coming. Yeah, most definitely,
Speaker 1: it's almost like a support system that um, like my
Speaker 1: mom and like some of the neighbors have created, like
Speaker 1: Alta or one of our second generation tenants, Leslie, you know,
Speaker 1: she's they can confide with one another, they can vent
Speaker 1: with one another, and um yeah yeah, so um, they've
Speaker 1: definitely like created strong bonds, and I think that's one
Speaker 1: of the reasons why they keep showing up. You know,
Speaker 1: it's it's women supporting women, and um, you know, they're
Speaker 1: the protectors of the family, they're the nurturers and that's
Speaker 1: what my mom taught me. So that's why definitely, one
Speaker 1: of the reasons why I continue to fight, um for
Speaker 1: Hillside to keep the housing not only for my mom
Speaker 1: because I'm like her protector and she's mine, but we're
Speaker 1: also like here to protect the community from from harassment
Speaker 1: or from literal bowling. Yeah. So I guess looking forward, Um,
Speaker 1: I think at the beginning interview, you said, yeah, it
Speaker 1: looks like there's going to be another fight over sort
Speaker 1: of forcing forcing the city to actually use eminent domain. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: do you have Well, okay, I don't know if you
Speaker 1: can talk about your plans for that. Yeah. I guess
Speaker 1: two things. One if if if people want to support
Speaker 1: what y'all are doing and you know, put pressure on
Speaker 1: the city, what are the best ways for them to
Speaker 1: do that? Mm hmmm, Um. Yeah, I think just following
Speaker 1: our our socials and staying updated about the fight and
Speaker 1: any action items that we put out is a great
Speaker 1: way to support and just amplifying the struggle. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In terms of our specific strategy for holding the city accountable, Um,
Speaker 1: we actually haven't haven't gotten super into the weeds of
Speaker 1: it yet because we are just taking a break for
Speaker 1: a while to yeah, you know, you know, yeah, to
Speaker 1: celebrate sound this one and um yeah, kind of have
Speaker 1: folks get perspective. I think our our view is that
Speaker 1: because the city has now approved the funds to make
Speaker 1: this happen, that um yeah, that there shouldn't be any
Speaker 1: barriers to them seeing it completely through. Um yeah, I
Speaker 1: think we can. We can maybe um apprehends some like
Speaker 1: ideological barriers because actually using eminent domainion to expropriate a
Speaker 1: landlord is not something that's been done before. Um. But yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll see what happens. Yeah. I mean, look, if if
Speaker 1: if they can displace tennants with eminent domain, they can,
Speaker 1: they can they can use it to keep tenants in
Speaker 1: their homes, like exactly. I guess the other question I
Speaker 1: have with that is what is okay? So like say,
Speaker 1: like I don't know, a miracle occurs and like you're
Speaker 1: and Lord is visited by like three ghosts at night
Speaker 1: who like show him increasingly horrible features, and he decides
Speaker 1: to sell it to the city. What is that? Like?
Speaker 1: What is the city owning the building? Look like? Mm hmmm, Yeah.
Speaker 1: I can start with that and then and I can
Speaker 1: chime in. But I think the vision of the tenants
Speaker 1: has always been collective stewardship and tenant ownership of the building. UM.
Speaker 1: So the fight definitely does not stop at the city
Speaker 1: um taking the building, but there will also be a
Speaker 1: push for actual tenant stewardship of the building too. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I think the exact structures of that UM aren't
Speaker 1: aren't so clear yet. There's still a lot of like
Speaker 1: discussions and work to be done around that. UM. But yeah,
Speaker 1: and the conversations that we've had with folks from the
Speaker 1: Housing Authority, which is going to be the agency that's
Speaker 1: actually purchasing the building. UM, they have expressed open us
Speaker 1: too to us actually um. Yeah, having another nonprofit takeover
Speaker 1: and eventually building towards like a co op kind of structure,
Speaker 1: that would be really cool. Yeah, I know, I know,
Speaker 1: I've heard a lot of talk among well I know,
Speaker 1: I think some people have don'e in Detroit about things
Speaker 1: the community land trusts as as a way to um yeah,
Speaker 1: I have tenants actually like control their buildings. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's definitely been part of the discussion. Yeah, that's that's awesome,
Speaker 1: because yeah, this is a much better solution than the
Speaker 1: state is now your landlord exactly. Yeah. Yeah, so that's
Speaker 1: the Yeah, that's that's the what we hope for in
Speaker 1: the future. Um, like Jane said, we still have a
Speaker 1: lot to work through, and this isn't done obviously. We wouldn't,
Speaker 1: like you said, want the state to be landlords here,
Speaker 1: they wouldn't be the best landlords. But yeah, um yeah,
Speaker 1: we we are, like Janna said, taking a pause and
Speaker 1: we will reconvene UM two plan out future steps to take.
Speaker 1: But this was a really really great win. Um. It
Speaker 1: was such a relief off of so many people, um
Speaker 1: back and something we've been fighting for over three three
Speaker 1: and a half years now. UM, so it's good to
Speaker 1: finally get somewhat of positive news. And it's been such
Speaker 1: an emotional journey for the last three years. Um. I
Speaker 1: mean that doesn't even justify how how much of an
Speaker 1: emotional roller coaster it has been for a lot of
Speaker 1: these tenants or for a lot of our families here. Um.
Speaker 1: When we got the news, um, everyone broke out in
Speaker 1: tears and joy and and and everyone was so surprised.
Speaker 1: I mean I couldn't help myself but to like cry
Speaker 1: and smile and ugly cry some more for like the
Speaker 1: whole day. Just yeah, um yeah, we're hoping for um,
Speaker 1: for the process to be um, somewhat smoother. Um now
Speaker 1: that that we've done a a large portion of the fight. Um,
Speaker 1: but yeah, we still we were still at the tail
Speaker 1: end things. Yeah. So where where where can people find
Speaker 1: find deals, organizations and groups and stuff to go follow
Speaker 1: them or help them in places? Um, for CCD, which
Speaker 1: does post a lot of Hillside um content, I think
Speaker 1: all of our socials are just at c C D,
Speaker 1: l A. And then for Hillside, I think, um, there's
Speaker 1: different handles for all the different different platforms unfortunately, but
Speaker 1: if folks just look up hill SIDEVA or Hillside Tenants,
Speaker 1: they should be able to find it. And if if
Speaker 1: you just send me the social media handles, you can
Speaker 1: put them in the description. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: thank thank you both so much for so much for
Speaker 1: talking to us. This was this was awesome. I'm so
Speaker 1: happy for you. Great, thank you. Yeah, thanks for thanks
Speaker 1: for listening. Yeah, this has been huge. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: guess for everyone out there, you two can take to
Speaker 1: start taking back your cities. And yeah, with with with
Speaker 1: with with any luck and with a lot of struggle.
Speaker 1: This is this is gonna this is gonna be the
Speaker 1: first of Betty and Yeah, fuck landlords, we can beat them.
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, flcome, we got this communities first, Landlord ng
Speaker 1: is not a job. We're here to take it back. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, it could happen here the podcast about it
Speaker 1: and and happening and could Chris take us away? I'm
Speaker 1: taking it away, Oh boy, I think I promised to Um.
Speaker 1: So uh, this is this has been a fun week
Speaker 1: so far. We're all kind of sitting through that in
Speaker 1: that awkward period where we know the Supreme Court is
Speaker 1: about to do some ship with Roe v. Wade and
Speaker 1: that that's gonna light a whole bunch of stuff on fire. Um.
Speaker 1: And so we're all waiting for that, and we're all
Speaker 1: waiting for the big Pride Month demonstrations in the wake
Speaker 1: of a shipload of um threats from the right. Uh.
Speaker 1: And kind of in that awkward interstital period, we got
Speaker 1: this this little burst this weekend of of of happiness,
Speaker 1: of just of pure joy. Um. So obviously we had
Speaker 1: covered a little earlier the Gundaleine rally and Quarterline, Idaho,
Speaker 1: which was a right wing kind of counter rally to
Speaker 1: quarter Aline's regular local pride Um rally. Uh. And you
Speaker 1: know it was a an event that the the the
Speaker 1: the p R four ahead of time was deeply unsettling,
Speaker 1: or a lot of like threats and talk about you know,
Speaker 1: let the fight start here and all that stuff. A
Speaker 1: lot of people were worried about a massacre, including us,
Speaker 1: because when you have a bunch of right wingers saying
Speaker 1: that anyone queer is grooming kids and it's time to
Speaker 1: shoot them, it's reasonable to be worried about a massacre. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: what we did see on the day, and this is
Speaker 1: something you'll note a lot of times when you get
Speaker 1: the events where there's a lot of threats around them,
Speaker 1: that's what kind of provokes enough attention, um and enough
Speaker 1: of a state response that that it's not where people
Speaker 1: try to ship. You know, it's often kind of at
Speaker 1: the edges of events or the events that uh, people
Speaker 1: don't take seriously enough ahead of time that like things
Speaker 1: go to ship. You know. Charlottesville would be a great
Speaker 1: example because prior to Charlottesville, there was a lot of
Speaker 1: like discussion about how big it was going to be
Speaker 1: in the city, you know, did not really take it seriously.
Speaker 1: There were a number of and this is one of
Speaker 1: the things that's frustrating the fucking mayor of Charlotte'sville. Is
Speaker 1: after what happened in Quarterline and stuff has been like
Speaker 1: on the news talking to people about how to how
Speaker 1: to avoid demonstrations going badly and ship which like that.
Speaker 1: You know, he received a lot of warnings from anti
Speaker 1: fascists about how many people with you know, pending violent
Speaker 1: charges were going to be at Unite the Right in
Speaker 1: Charlottesville and how many threats were going on. It was
Speaker 1: kind of ignored and as a result it got really
Speaker 1: fucking ugly because you know, you had smaller numbers is
Speaker 1: on the on the first night, you know, when people
Speaker 1: got surrounded by that torchlit mob, you had smaller numbers
Speaker 1: of anti fascists, um outnumbered by fascists and no real
Speaker 1: counter to them until you know the next day, and
Speaker 1: obviously that's the day that that that James Alex Fields
Speaker 1: drove a car into a crowd um and that kind
Speaker 1: of starts our story today because the thing that was
Speaker 1: the bright ray of sunlight in in the midst of
Speaker 1: what has been a pretty rough couple of weeks news wise,
Speaker 1: was thirty one members of the hate group Patriot Front
Speaker 1: getting arrested in Quarterlaine, Idaho, jammed into the back of
Speaker 1: a U haul UM and the story of Patriot Front
Speaker 1: and the story of how that that beautiful moment happened.
Speaker 1: UM starts in Charlottesville in two seventeen. Actually it starts
Speaker 1: significantly before that in Texas. But uh, the group that
Speaker 1: becomes Patriot Front starts as a group called Vanguard America UM.
Speaker 1: And Vanguard America is one of the groups that is
Speaker 1: responsible for kind of carrying out the the Unite the
Speaker 1: Right rally. And this is this is a different group
Speaker 1: than American Vanguard. Right. Uh wait, let my double check here,
Speaker 1: because sorry, they all use such similar names. UM. If
Speaker 1: I'm not mistaken, there is an American Vanguard. UM. There's
Speaker 1: also the American Vanguard Corporation. Uh no, no, no, I
Speaker 1: think it's UM. American Guard. American Guard is the group
Speaker 1: that UM is a kind of more coming out of
Speaker 1: the KKK S sphere orbit because some of them are
Speaker 1: former clansmen. That's another story for another day. UM. So
Speaker 1: you've got Vanguard America. They're one of the group's kind
Speaker 1: of behind bringing a lot of people, a lot of fascists,
Speaker 1: shouldn't call them people to UM Charlottesville. In two thousand
Speaker 1: and seventeen, James Alex Field is marching with them and
Speaker 1: carrying one of their shields. Earlier in the day before
Speaker 1: he carries out his car attack, and as a result
Speaker 1: of the bad press that him murdering a woman in
Speaker 1: and maiming a bunch of people with his car in
Speaker 1: a terrorist attack brings down um, the leader of Vanguard America,
Speaker 1: Thomas Rousseau uh splits off like kind of ins Vanguard
Speaker 1: America and spins it off into Patriot Front, which is
Speaker 1: less explicitly just as fascist, but less branded as fascist,
Speaker 1: more kind of branded in Americana. They all of their
Speaker 1: pr and all of their like images look like rejected
Speaker 1: stills from a BioShock game. Yeah, it's it's it's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure. Yeah, these are the guys are like that.
Speaker 1: There there's a video of them like talking like like
Speaker 1: like they're literally they go like on camera it's like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, we're doing America stuff. We don't we're not
Speaker 1: hitler people. And then like the build the boat with
Speaker 1: the camera turns off there like oh good, the cameras off.
Speaker 1: We can say say kale now, yeah, it's it's great.
Speaker 1: I mean, Van Guard America's logo was literally like an
Speaker 1: eagle carrying a bundle of fascis. Yeah, they're not not subtle. Um.
Speaker 1: And I should say Van Guard America I think was
Speaker 1: actually founded by another guy in in California, but um,
Speaker 1: Thomas Rousseau was pretty quickly prominence in there, and he
Speaker 1: splinters off into into Patriot Front. I need to be
Speaker 1: specific because there's people listening who will yell at me
Speaker 1: for getting that wrong. Um. So for the purpose of
Speaker 1: of what we're talking about today, we should chat about
Speaker 1: Thomas Rousseau UM before we get into some of the
Speaker 1: funnier stuff, because he's got a really interesting background for
Speaker 1: a fascist. So in the last couple of years since
Speaker 1: Patriot Front became a thing, Rousseau has held a number
Speaker 1: of kind of like flash demonstrations where they'll get a
Speaker 1: few dozen Patriot Front guys together and they'll march around
Speaker 1: in their fucking gators and their their little fascist uniforms
Speaker 1: that are like, um, I don't know, they look like
Speaker 1: country club Nazis is like the way they prefer to dress. Um.
Speaker 1: And they'll carry their shields and they'll you know, film
Speaker 1: propaganda videos. Most of what they do is hand out
Speaker 1: like put out stickers, put out other kinds of propaganda
Speaker 1: to the extent that like they are probably the primary
Speaker 1: national purveyors of of Nazi propaganda um in like the
Speaker 1: real world, like in terms of stuff that actually gets
Speaker 1: put out where people can see it. Um. There I've
Speaker 1: found like stickers from them and just like random places
Speaker 1: in Chicago. Yeah, yeah, I've seen a couple of them.
Speaker 1: Like two nineteen, Patriot Front was and this is the
Speaker 1: A d l s estimates, so they're not the most
Speaker 1: accurate they could be, but also no one else is
Speaker 1: really keeping track of this, so I'll say they're probably
Speaker 1: broadly correct. UM. The in two thousand nineteen, the A
Speaker 1: d L listed Patriot Front is responsible for eight percent
Speaker 1: of all propaganda incidents nationally of like Nazi type groups UM.
Speaker 1: And then in a number doubled um and they were
Speaker 1: responsible for like ninety plus. I think sometimes you'll hear
Speaker 1: ninety two percent of like the Nazi propaganda distributed nationwide. UM.
Speaker 1: Their propaganda efforts are most active in Texas, Washington, California, Massachusetts,
Speaker 1: New York, and Virginia. UM. And it's one of those things,
Speaker 1: this is not the goal with the propaganda is for
Speaker 1: them to be seen as very large and influential. The
Speaker 1: way that they managed to do it is that Patriot
Speaker 1: Front is effectively like a key para social relationship for
Speaker 1: most of the people in it. Right. It's a series
Speaker 1: of like chats and and and discords and whatnot, and
Speaker 1: these people like come to feel like it's their community.
Speaker 1: And one of the things were so did that was
Speaker 1: very smart is if you want to stay a member
Speaker 1: of Patriot Front, you will get banned and purged from
Speaker 1: the organization if you are not regularly posting proof that
Speaker 1: you're active in the real world. And the easiest way
Speaker 1: to do that is by putting up stickers. Right. So
Speaker 1: that's not only how they fund some of their operations
Speaker 1: because you know their guys are buying stickers, but um,
Speaker 1: that's how you keep people engaged. If you want to
Speaker 1: like stay in the clubhouse with your friends, you have
Speaker 1: to go put up stickers every couple of weeks or
Speaker 1: every so often. And you know, when you have a
Speaker 1: couple of hundred people doing that. Stickers are not that expensive.
Speaker 1: You can get a lot of propaganda out that way.
Speaker 1: And so Rousseau has been very successful in in that
Speaker 1: end of things. So let's chat about him a little bit.
Speaker 1: He is was born in nine so he's twenty four
Speaker 1: ish right now. Um, he grew up where I did.
Speaker 1: He comes from the suburbs of Dallas, the metroplex, specifically Copel.
Speaker 1: And if you're not if you don't know much about
Speaker 1: the d f W suburbs, So Dallas sizeable city about
Speaker 1: four million people last I checked. Um, and then you've
Speaker 1: got these these suburbs that are millions more and it's
Speaker 1: it's effectively DFW is kind of this megalopolis, Like it's
Speaker 1: this massive, sprawling city, larger than several states, and it's
Speaker 1: geographical area. At some point in the future, assuming growth
Speaker 1: can tenues, you're going to see like all of the
Speaker 1: big cities in Texas merge and when their metro plexus
Speaker 1: start to mingle. Um. But these these these Texas suburbs
Speaker 1: are all laid out very orderly in grids. They were
Speaker 1: all they're all like planned communities. Um. And in the
Speaker 1: area around like this particular chunk around Dallas, they're all
Speaker 1: pretty wealthy. And of these wealthy suburbs, Coppel is like
Speaker 1: where the money money is. Like like coming up in Planoh,
Speaker 1: which is was a fairly well off suburb, we would
Speaker 1: like the Coppell kids were like the rich kids, right
Speaker 1: Like when we would compete against them in football and
Speaker 1: speech debate like that, you'd feel like, yeah, we're like
Speaker 1: funking with the rich kids. Let's get them. So this
Speaker 1: is this is this is this is like this is
Speaker 1: like this is like uh dellas fort worst like Evanston.
Speaker 1: I assume so yes, um. And when we would like
Speaker 1: obviously like yeah they were the rich kids, they were
Speaker 1: also like the kids I would often get drugs from
Speaker 1: when I was like nineteen because they had like they
Speaker 1: had they had good drugs, you know. UM. So the
Speaker 1: other thing you should know about and Coppell is where
Speaker 1: you know, um our boy Thomas Rousseau grows up in
Speaker 1: the early two thousands, UM and in fact his senior
Speaker 1: year is the year of the election. UM. And another
Speaker 1: thing you should know about Kapel is that, like all
Speaker 1: the Dallas metroplex, it's incredibly diverse. And it's also, I
Speaker 1: should know, incredibly diverse in a specific way. It's not
Speaker 1: hugely economically diverse, UM, but it is has a massive
Speaker 1: population of people from Southeast Asia, UM, from India, from Vietnam,
Speaker 1: from China, um and from Japan UM. And the You
Speaker 1: can kind of see that if you look at so
Speaker 1: Thomas Rousseau as a kid works for the Coppel High
Speaker 1: school newspaper, the Sidekick, And if you if you go
Speaker 1: to the Sidekicks website today and if you look at
Speaker 1: its writers and its editorial staff, it is a bunch
Speaker 1: of kids from Southeast Asia. Now, Thomas so is extremely white, um,
Speaker 1: and he has, you know, his big things like replacement theory.
Speaker 1: He's been yelling about this for a very long time, UM,
Speaker 1: and so one kind of assumes this is probably where
Speaker 1: he started feeling that. Um. Although it's interesting if you
Speaker 1: look up, like one of the earliest articles, the SPLC
Speaker 1: has a pretty pretty good profile on him and back
Speaker 1: kind of at the start of UM. In February, he wrote,
Speaker 1: write this article about the school's diversity club, which is
Speaker 1: just a pretty normal you would not there's no signs
Speaker 1: in there. Not that I saw that, like he's going
Speaker 1: to be a Nazi in about a year. Like, it's
Speaker 1: just it's how like basically anybody who was writing a
Speaker 1: straight piece of reporting on a diversity club would write it.
Speaker 1: You know, It's not like there's no signs in that article. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just because like the next article he writes is
Speaker 1: like completely off the rails. Yeah, like it's it's Trumps
Speaker 1: at that point, because you know, February, Trump is still
Speaker 1: like I don't know, he's definitely becoming the front runner,
Speaker 1: but it's not clear what's going to happen yet. And
Speaker 1: by the time he writes his next article a couple
Speaker 1: in like October, it's a full on trumpy. Yeah. He's like,
Speaker 1: I mean, he's like but by that point, like he
Speaker 1: started his great replacement stuff. He started, like, I mean,
Speaker 1: he's doing that kind of like the the white working
Speaker 1: class has been like oppressed for too long and people
Speaker 1: keep calling them bracest and so they're voting for Trump
Speaker 1: now because they're simultaneously poor. But also like, but but
Speaker 1: I think it's interesting. It's like, you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: an interesting sign of that kind of like what actually
Speaker 1: generates that kind of right wing populism because it's like,
Speaker 1: so you have you have someone who's like going fascist
Speaker 1: really quickly writing this, and it's like, oh, where is
Speaker 1: he from? A wait, he's like just from like the
Speaker 1: incredible rich kid place. It's like it's it's it's it's
Speaker 1: it's fun he's doing Yeah, he's he's doing this sort
Speaker 1: of fascist version of the like working class whispering that yeah,
Speaker 1: kind of like rich Pundit's doing. And it's one of
Speaker 1: the things the kind of black box mysteries with Rousseau
Speaker 1: that I haven't seen a great is like when when
Speaker 1: does the actual switch flip in his head? Like when
Speaker 1: he writes that article about the school diversity club. Is
Speaker 1: he already a fascist um or is he one of
Speaker 1: these people who like is kind of conservative and gets
Speaker 1: super radicalized by Trump because he had, you see throughout
Speaker 1: kind of because I get the feeling from him that
Speaker 1: he was always kind of like the conservative kid in
Speaker 1: his school paper in school media, and like you get
Speaker 1: you see, like he's writing, like the month after that
Speaker 1: diversity club article, he writes h an article about campus
Speaker 1: carry and is like supporting concealed carry on college campuses
Speaker 1: and is pretty like, uh, but it's also these are
Speaker 1: also like kind of it's also kind of a milk
Speaker 1: toast conservative take, Like it's not he's not like making
Speaker 1: an explicitly fascist argument. He's making the kind of arguments
Speaker 1: that like I would have made in speech and debate
Speaker 1: class as a conservative kid in North Texas when I
Speaker 1: was a senior. You see, like in May he's writing
Speaker 1: an article about like bathroom bills and stuff that's that's
Speaker 1: getting closer to kind of modern American fascist rhetoric. And
Speaker 1: then of course by like October he's he's fully on
Speaker 1: the Trump train. Um. And he actually has a removed
Speaker 1: opinion column after the election about like the Silent Majority,
Speaker 1: where he says, quote, the truth is, white voters, especially
Speaker 1: the working class, have had more than enough of being
Speaker 1: called racist, sexist, sinophobic, islamophobic, homophobic, and the rest of
Speaker 1: the usual trite buzzwords. The forgotten majority of the American
Speaker 1: electorate has shown that, much to the dismay of the
Speaker 1: globalist agenda, that they have not yet been replaced by
Speaker 1: tens of millions of blue voting immigrants from abroad. And
Speaker 1: it's again, you can kind of there's a debate as
Speaker 1: to whether you can, I guess argue as to whether
Speaker 1: or not he had always been sort of a fascist
Speaker 1: and just felt like more comfortable as the year went
Speaker 1: on open about it, or if he's getting radicalized. I
Speaker 1: feel like he's kind of getting radical. I can see.
Speaker 1: I can see in him like shades of everyone that
Speaker 1: I knew back then at that point in time in
Speaker 1: my life, including me, like, well in this reminds so
Speaker 1: so I was I'm like a year older than he is, right,
Speaker 1: so I I I was out of high school by sixteen,
Speaker 1: but like I you know, i'd like I just graduated
Speaker 1: right like good. And I remember this with like people
Speaker 1: with people that I knew who were like because I
Speaker 1: mean like, okay, like there were always people who were
Speaker 1: like really really like like we had a lot of
Speaker 1: like Fox News pilled like kill all the Muslims kids,
Speaker 1: but there are also people who like weren't like that,
Speaker 1: who were just like conservatives, and over the course of
Speaker 1: sixteen like they went really really like they radicalized really quickly.
Speaker 1: So it wouldn't surprise me if if she's doing the
Speaker 1: same thing, because I think that was a lot of like,
Speaker 1: like I I washed a lot of sort of like
Speaker 1: more majority people get like who were kind of like
Speaker 1: on who weren't on the like absolute like right wing,
Speaker 1: like I don't know, like who weren't unli the absolutely
Speaker 1: hard right of that thing. We're kind of like conservative,
Speaker 1: but you know, like weren't actively invested in murdering every
Speaker 1: gapers And yeah, like those people just like a switch
Speaker 1: flipped and they like they just kind of went syco mode. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's that's where he goes. He goes like full
Speaker 1: on and I don't know you can. It's interesting because
Speaker 1: like his his primary job for the sidekick, the Cupell
Speaker 1: High school student newspaper is as like their their political cartoonist,
Speaker 1: and he's he's mostly doing like really basic like clip
Speaker 1: art ship, which is what you see him doing for
Speaker 1: like Patriot Front. It's kind of the thing that distinguishes
Speaker 1: them is his like art style, UM and the propaganda
Speaker 1: he makes. So you know he's there at United the
Speaker 1: right in seen one of the guys he's there with
Speaker 1: commits a terrorist attack. They spin off Patriot Front and
Speaker 1: for the next few years, most of what they'll do
Speaker 1: is these events where they'll like show up and they'll march. Um.
Speaker 1: It's worth noting that while they bring different kinds of
Speaker 1: weapons to these events, mainly like you know, bludgeoning weapons,
Speaker 1: the kind of things you'd have for like a street fight,
Speaker 1: um and shields, these are not primarily violent events, and
Speaker 1: that like their goal is not to get into a fight.
Speaker 1: I think mainly not because they're not violent people, because
Speaker 1: they're scared of getting into a fight, um, and Rousseau's
Speaker 1: probably scared of getting in trouble for having a bunch
Speaker 1: of people show up to riot. So most of what
Speaker 1: they do is they'll do these flash mobs while there.
Speaker 1: They'll get like a bunch of people together in the
Speaker 1: middle of the night or like on a day when
Speaker 1: nobody expects it, and they'll march around d C or something.
Speaker 1: And then they'll get footage of themselves doing this march
Speaker 1: where you know, they can kind of uh take care
Speaker 1: to make sure the angles make them look as impressive
Speaker 1: as possible, and then they'll put that up to try
Speaker 1: and get more members, um, so that they can put
Speaker 1: up more propaganda. Right, they've had a couple of well
Speaker 1: publicized failures. They showed up in Philadelphia. I think this
Speaker 1: was last year, right, and they again there's like thirty
Speaker 1: to fifty of them. They all like pilot of a
Speaker 1: U haul. They're marching is like in their fascist uniforms,
Speaker 1: and like three dudes confront them and that fit like
Speaker 1: three Philly guys just wreck their ship. Been so funny,
Speaker 1: I understand. I think it was from that. We're just
Speaker 1: like there's like there's a video, it's it's just them
Speaker 1: running away and there's like there's like objects flying through
Speaker 1: the air, you know, like their little army confronts, like
Speaker 1: three random Philly We are just like, oh, this isn't
Speaker 1: any good. I don't know who these guys are, but
Speaker 1: there's no way this is good. Puck them up. Um,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a perfect Philly moment. Um. So yeah,
Speaker 1: and like that is their m o UM. And in
Speaker 1: part because one thing you have to and I people
Speaker 1: can misinterpret what I'm saying here. They're probably the most
Speaker 1: disciplined of the fascist groups that do regular in person
Speaker 1: events UM because there's a lot of discipline required in
Speaker 1: getting several dozen people together, getting them all to the
Speaker 1: the area in the exact same mode of transport together.
Speaker 1: That's why they all pile into u Hall's right. Roussou
Speaker 1: doesn't want to coordinate a big caravan UM. That would
Speaker 1: be messy. People would be arriving at different times, people
Speaker 1: would get lost or get stuck in traffic. He wants
Speaker 1: everyone together because he's again he's a fascist. So they're
Speaker 1: they're really um and they are are pretty consistent and
Speaker 1: pretty good at getting everyone together and marching at the
Speaker 1: same time. So like on a logistic end, there's some
Speaker 1: things they do that are are competent, you know, um
Speaker 1: generally speaking. Now, the downside of this plan I've just
Speaker 1: talked about like why getting everyone in a U hall
Speaker 1: can work and how it has worked for them in
Speaker 1: the past. The downside of this is that everyone is
Speaker 1: in a U hall together. I mean, I think I
Speaker 1: think for them there there's they're I think there's some
Speaker 1: upside like for them doing this, which is that like
Speaker 1: I think on a sort of like on like a
Speaker 1: discipline level, on level of sort of like building this
Speaker 1: like like build building this sort of like culture of
Speaker 1: like like community and like solidarity, but like the fascist
Speaker 1: version of it is like, yeah, you have everyone suffering
Speaker 1: together in the back of a U haul, which is
Speaker 1: HoTT as shit and like has to smell like like
Speaker 1: like like death, like like yeah, it's like like imagine
Speaker 1: the worst locker room you've ever been in. But then
Speaker 1: it's been it's every everyone has been trapped in there
Speaker 1: for a week. It's like, yeah, it's a it's a
Speaker 1: hot air balloon powered by Nazi farts, like that's that's
Speaker 1: what's going on there. And they're all just like and
Speaker 1: it's it's very funny because like when they had done
Speaker 1: their last event or two and like this is like
Speaker 1: in the dead of winter in the East Coast that
Speaker 1: they do a couple of events and they have people
Speaker 1: like nearly passing out from heat stroke in the back
Speaker 1: of the van. Yeah. Um, in the back of the
Speaker 1: U haul because like it's not great to be scrammed
Speaker 1: in the back of you people. It's like, um, it sucks.
Speaker 1: But also like like that that suffering sort of like
Speaker 1: brings them together and makes them sort of like sure,
Speaker 1: like yeah in a lot of ways, which sucks. But
Speaker 1: also yeah, the second modistical problem with this that I
Speaker 1: think you're about to get to. Yeah, so they try
Speaker 1: to Rousseau actually puts out specific like information about like, hey,
Speaker 1: here's how we need to prep for being crammed into
Speaker 1: a U haul together, and like advises that his dudes
Speaker 1: start um uh spending time in saunas and ship in
Speaker 1: order to like toughen themselves up to avoid getting heat syncope. Um. Anyway,
Speaker 1: there's a couple other things that are happening. One of
Speaker 1: the things that we we know because one of the
Speaker 1: funny things about Patriot Front, so they claim to have
Speaker 1: an intense vetting process. You know, you're supposed to like
Speaker 1: message them with an application and then they they'll vet
Speaker 1: you before they let you into the chat rooms. They
Speaker 1: have been compromised since the day there started being a
Speaker 1: patriot Ye. I don't think there is a moment of
Speaker 1: the time that they have existed that I haven't known
Speaker 1: multiple people who had logs of every conversation. Like they're
Speaker 1: so infiltrated. It is extreme, Like it's like it's like
Speaker 1: the training wheels of anti fascist research, just like get
Speaker 1: into Patriot fronts chat rooms, Like there's always multiple people
Speaker 1: in their documenting their ship. It's extremely funny. Um. And
Speaker 1: so because of that we know a number of their tactics.
Speaker 1: One of the things that Rousseau has admitted to doing
Speaker 1: in the past is that like, well, when we start
Speaker 1: like heading towards wherever we're gonna you know, pile out
Speaker 1: of the thing in march, we'll call the cops and
Speaker 1: will inform them that we've seen a group of people
Speaker 1: with shields getting ready to march and that they don't
Speaker 1: seem to have weapons, but they're about to be an
Speaker 1: x area. And they do this so that there will
Speaker 1: be cops on scene who will provide like an escort
Speaker 1: for them, right, so that they won't get beaten up. Um,
Speaker 1: Like they want the cops to be there to protect them,
Speaker 1: you know. Um. So Rousseau is like specifically bragged about
Speaker 1: doing this in the past. There's also, like, as I stated,
Speaker 1: like the or as an organization, their events are not
Speaker 1: geared towards like killing people, right, Like they're not they're
Speaker 1: doing these marches to get videos. They're not like they're
Speaker 1: not even like the Proud Boys, where they're specifically showing
Speaker 1: up to get into a brawl, right And every time
Speaker 1: they do get into brawls they look very uncomfortable and
Speaker 1: frightened in them, um, which is why he liked calls
Speaker 1: for police escorts and ship. Um that said, there there
Speaker 1: are like again, they're a Nazi organization. They specifically preach
Speaker 1: replacement theory and yelled at their ancestors conquered America and
Speaker 1: so they deserve to own it all this ship. So
Speaker 1: a bunch of them have been arrested for like guns stuff.
Speaker 1: There's been a number of like people of Patriot Front
Speaker 1: members arrested for like illegal machine guns and ship like that.
Speaker 1: That absolutely happens. People post about their illegal guns and
Speaker 1: stuff um. But as an organization, their mainly yeared towards
Speaker 1: providing like propaganda uh that Thomas Rousseau likes. So they
Speaker 1: all gathered together and are heading into Quarterline, Idaho to
Speaker 1: confront this, and I suspect their goal. I suspect their
Speaker 1: Russeau's hope for how this was going to go was
Speaker 1: they were going to pile out of their uhul, going
Speaker 1: to get their thirty ish guys all in lines together
Speaker 1: in their uniforms, with their shields and with their their
Speaker 1: fucking fascist sticks or whatever, um, and they're gonna march
Speaker 1: through the middle of the pride gathering and and they
Speaker 1: get video of people like scattering or backing away from
Speaker 1: in front of them, not wanting to confront them, because
Speaker 1: you know, there was a big group of them. I
Speaker 1: think that was the hope. I'm sure Rousseau was like, Hey,
Speaker 1: and maybe some anti FOO will try to fight and
Speaker 1: we'll get some videos of us like fighting them with
Speaker 1: shields and that'll be good for recruitment. Um. But I
Speaker 1: think the main goal was to get a video of
Speaker 1: them scaring gay kids um and and looking like a
Speaker 1: big scary nazi FEI links that they could use as propaganda.
Speaker 1: Um now this goes to ship before they even get
Speaker 1: out of the U haul, because somebody calls the police
Speaker 1: and reports what looks like a little army of guys
Speaker 1: with weapons and shields piling into a U haul. And
Speaker 1: again the police are saying that this was a concerned
Speaker 1: citizen and it based on the kind of most recent reporting,
Speaker 1: it may just be a random citizen of Quarterline who
Speaker 1: actually like was for understandable reasons, right, if you like
Speaker 1: see this happening, you're like, yeah, maybe I should I
Speaker 1: might need to call somebody about this. Yeah. Um, I
Speaker 1: wouldn't call the cops necessarily, but you know, in this case,
Speaker 1: it seems to have worked out that said, knowing their background,
Speaker 1: you have to acknowledge the possibility that they that it
Speaker 1: was one of them who called the police. Impossible. Um now,
Speaker 1: there's initially reports that it was the FEDS reports, I
Speaker 1: should say, from the cops on the scene. And again
Speaker 1: it's reasonable that journalists overhearing that recording it would report
Speaker 1: on it that said cops on the scene are no
Speaker 1: more accurate about what actually has happened than like random
Speaker 1: passers by, and they're more likely just openly lie and
Speaker 1: and you know, I I would not. I'm certain there's
Speaker 1: a FED or or or four inside Patriot Front that
Speaker 1: said it doesn't seem like this was a FED bust,
Speaker 1: although I you know, it's not impossible that it was,
Speaker 1: because if you were the FEDS and you had a
Speaker 1: guy in here and you decided you want to arrest
Speaker 1: these people to avoid a potential Charlottesville kind of situation
Speaker 1: happening again, um, maybe you would want to just say
Speaker 1: it was like a random person who called I don't know,
Speaker 1: this does not there's no reason that this needed to
Speaker 1: be a FED bust. They were not like this did
Speaker 1: not require the FBI's infiltration capability to deal with. Like
Speaker 1: it it was a bunch of Nazis piling into a
Speaker 1: U haul. I don't have trouble believing that some dude
Speaker 1: was just like, hey, hey cops. Yeah, and it's there's
Speaker 1: been a lot of like surprise online that like, the
Speaker 1: cops did their job, but they went after these people.
Speaker 1: I think the surprise there is kind of based on
Speaker 1: some misconceptions, and these are misconceptions kind of pushed in
Speaker 1: part by the fact that over the last few years,
Speaker 1: when we have seen fascist groups rally in places like Portland, UM,
Speaker 1: or like Charlottesville. UM. For the United the Right rally,
Speaker 1: the cops tend to be on their side and tend
Speaker 1: to protect them. UM. But what you're looking at are
Speaker 1: two different things in a lot of ways. Because the
Speaker 1: cops in a place like Portland, and I assume in
Speaker 1: a place like Charlottesville, I'm not as familiar with their
Speaker 1: police demographics, but I know this is the case in
Speaker 1: Portland don't live in Portland. They live in places like Battleground, Washington.
Speaker 1: You know. Um, they live in these these the surrounding
Speaker 1: more rural and suburban communities, and they don't like the
Speaker 1: city that they police, and they kind of see them
Speaker 1: as an enemy. So when other people generally from similar
Speaker 1: suburbs and rural communities as the cops show up to
Speaker 1: fight the kids that Portland cops don't like, um, the
Speaker 1: Portland cops are going to be on the side of that.
Speaker 1: And this is again you see version of this occur
Speaker 1: around the country. In quart Aline, this was not like
Speaker 1: quarterline cops live in cort Aline, you know, like they
Speaker 1: they're from that community. And even if I'm sure a
Speaker 1: number of them, if not many or most of them
Speaker 1: have like attitudes towards you know, have said some negative
Speaker 1: things about gay people. These are also like they're probably
Speaker 1: some of them are probably related to people with that
Speaker 1: pride rally. Um this is and in general these are
Speaker 1: like there's they are probably seeing this as like, well,
Speaker 1: whatever I think about pride. These are people who live
Speaker 1: in quart Aline and a bunch of folks from outside
Speaker 1: of the state are driving into funk with them. They're
Speaker 1: not generally going to be on board with that. And
Speaker 1: as a general rule, also, cops don't like people coming
Speaker 1: in to their town like home to cause trouble. And
Speaker 1: these are people from like eleven different states entering Idaho
Speaker 1: to like funk with people who live in Idaho. I'm
Speaker 1: not surprised that the police actually did something here. Um.
Speaker 1: It doesn't like mean that these are the good cops
Speaker 1: that were mythically all looking for. It just means that
Speaker 1: like nobody wants this happening in their hometown. Like nobody
Speaker 1: nobody wants these assholes running into town dressed as like
Speaker 1: little Hitler youth guys and marching around like that's like,
Speaker 1: of course they don't want that. Who would? Um, So
Speaker 1: the cops pull over this fucking new haul. Um, there's
Speaker 1: the footage of it is some of the funniest ship
Speaker 1: on the space of the Earth's so good because they
Speaker 1: just roll up the back of this thing. There's like
Speaker 1: some fucking quardling cop with an a R like pointed
Speaker 1: in there, and there's just all these fucking goober Nazis
Speaker 1: and they're they're fucking Polos and Khakis and their fascist gators. Um, god,
Speaker 1: it's good. I look up this footage. If you can
Speaker 1: find you owe yourself to do this. It's amazing. We
Speaker 1: should state we're not really We'll be getting more coverage
Speaker 1: to what happens and what happened elsewhere on this day.
Speaker 1: You had a lot of ugly ship happened to day
Speaker 1: in Quardlinge because there are a lot of heavily armed
Speaker 1: fascists rallying who are are in many cases locals or
Speaker 1: from nearby places like Spokane. Um, Matt Shay, who is
Speaker 1: a former state legislator from Washington who lives nearby, who
Speaker 1: is a accused domestic terrorist, leads a march through quard Aline.
Speaker 1: These guys are not stopped by the cops right in
Speaker 1: part because like they're not a bunch of dudes from
Speaker 1: out of state showing up to march around in ridiculous
Speaker 1: Nazi uniforms. Right, the police are notably less concerned about
Speaker 1: the guys in a R fifteen and plate carriers than
Speaker 1: they are about Patriot Front, which is again it's because
Speaker 1: of like what's actually going on here, you know, um,
Speaker 1: but there are like armed people fright like threatening and
Speaker 1: and trying to confront or at least standing around outside
Speaker 1: of a Pride march in a way that you know,
Speaker 1: if you're doing that with a bunch of guns, that's concerning.
Speaker 1: Anti fascists show up to protest them and very successfully
Speaker 1: kind of keep a wall between the folks showing up
Speaker 1: for Pride and the folks rallying with guns. Um, So
Speaker 1: that it is a thing that is happening. I don't
Speaker 1: want to This has been the thing that has kind
Speaker 1: of like gotten the most attention from Quarterly and I
Speaker 1: don't think that's bad, like from a standpoint of like
Speaker 1: what is useful Seeing a bunch of Nazis get their
Speaker 1: ship like wrecked is definitely an ideal takeaway from the
Speaker 1: Quarterline event because, especially considering the amount of violence I
Speaker 1: think we were all worried might occur there Um, I'm
Speaker 1: very happy that the primary takeaway is Patriot Front all
Speaker 1: got arrested. Um, But the things that we were concerned
Speaker 1: about there again, there's a bunch of dudes show up
Speaker 1: with guns to stare at a Pride rally. That's not
Speaker 1: a not a positive development. But this group of Nazis
Speaker 1: all get arrested, and that is positive because it's extremely
Speaker 1: funny and sometimes it's nice for things to just be funny. Um.
Speaker 1: So the next kind of thing you see from Patriot
Speaker 1: Front is them all pulled out of a U haul
Speaker 1: on their knees, handcuffed, getting arrested one by one, uh
Speaker 1: and taken to a jail and quarterly there's some very
Speaker 1: funny quotes were like the police are being gas do
Speaker 1: you even have room for all these people? And they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: we'll figure it out. Like, don't worry, it's um Rousseau
Speaker 1: and a bunch of guys are in getting criminal conspiracy charges. Um,
Speaker 1: they're all getting conspiracy to riot, which is a misdemeanor.
Speaker 1: There's some rumors that a journalist posted that a number
Speaker 1: of them have illegal had illegal guns and they're getting
Speaker 1: illegal gun charges. I haven't seen confirmation about that. I'd
Speaker 1: be shocked if some of them were not carrying guns
Speaker 1: in the state of Idaho. Anybody can right. UM. I
Speaker 1: do think they were specifically violating the law by having
Speaker 1: firearms while sitting in the box back of a box truck,
Speaker 1: because I think, for like reasons of accidents that have
Speaker 1: happened hunting, you're not supposed to do that in Idaho. UM.
Speaker 1: But I haven't seen charges as a result of that. Um.
Speaker 1: It's debatable as to what's going to stick. However, there's
Speaker 1: reasons to kind of suspect that something will because they
Speaker 1: had like seven or whatever page plan for how to
Speaker 1: handle the like they had their little riot notes. Oh god,
Speaker 1: they had like sticks and a smoke bomb and stuff.
Speaker 1: So it's not like an impossible case to convict them.
Speaker 1: I will say, you know, like, you're not you're not
Speaker 1: asking like the moon of the police in this instance,
Speaker 1: to like or of the prosecutors or whatever to be
Speaker 1: able to actually convict UM. So we'll see what happens. UM.
Speaker 1: What's definitely happening is that this is very funny. Um.
Speaker 1: Patriot Front is extremely incompetent. I would not take this
Speaker 1: as a broader sign that like number one, the police
Speaker 1: are taking threats against Pride rallies. More seriously, No, Um,
Speaker 1: I would not take this as a broader sign that
Speaker 1: like fascists are are are getting heavily stopped. I also wouldn't.
Speaker 1: There's also been people saying that like and again this
Speaker 1: is coming from that journalists who claim that, like there's
Speaker 1: a bunch of gun charges pending, and maybe there are,
Speaker 1: but like, I think the comment she made was like
Speaker 1: a massacre was averted. I do not believe Patriot Front
Speaker 1: was planning to massacre or anybody there's That's just that's
Speaker 1: not their m o. That's not like again, not that
Speaker 1: they're not Nazis, not that they don't want people dead,
Speaker 1: but like they're like, these guys are like the milk
Speaker 1: toast is baby ist Nazis, right, they show up and
Speaker 1: they march around in their fucking like Tommy hill Figer
Speaker 1: Nazi uniforms. You know, like they're not these are not
Speaker 1: folks planning in an organized capacity to commit acts of
Speaker 1: mass violence. Um, because that would be scary to them
Speaker 1: because they're mostly like suburban middle class kids. Um. One
Speaker 1: of the funniest things that has come out of this
Speaker 1: is like one of the Nazis who get arrested in
Speaker 1: Idaho's mom has started doing the news because she's like,
Speaker 1: I kicked him out of the house. I keep trying
Speaker 1: to get him to I don't know what to do
Speaker 1: to get him out of this group. So I've told
Speaker 1: him he can't live with me anymore because after his divorce,
Speaker 1: he's been living with me. Um, and I'm going to
Speaker 1: talk to the media about the fact that my son
Speaker 1: is a stupid Nazi until he stops being one. I
Speaker 1: don't know what else to do. And it does sound
Speaker 1: like she's really legitimately like trying to grapple with like
Speaker 1: I don't know why he's doing this. I don't know
Speaker 1: how to stop it, but like it seems like the
Speaker 1: best thing I can do is embarrass him, um, which
Speaker 1: is I think probably a good move on her part. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a fun Daily Beast article about that. You could
Speaker 1: really hear her frustrations, like I don't know why he's
Speaker 1: doing this, like it all started around. It's very frustrating
Speaker 1: you feel for her. So I don't know, Chris, you
Speaker 1: got anything else to say about Patriot Front. I I
Speaker 1: do think it's extremely funny that, like, well, I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't know. In some sense, it's funny. In some sense,
Speaker 1: it's kind of disturbing, which is that like the rights
Speaker 1: reaction to this was immediately to accuse all of him
Speaker 1: and being Feds. Yeah, I mean, which, like it's interesting
Speaker 1: to me that, like that's just like anytime something happens
Speaker 1: in the US now, like and this is this is
Speaker 1: across almost the entire political spectrum, everyone immediately this was
Speaker 1: the Feds or so sometime sometimes sometimes you get it
Speaker 1: was Russia because sometimes you yeah, because it's like if
Speaker 1: you're someone who like the Feds are the good guys,
Speaker 1: it's like, well, you need another person who did all this.
Speaker 1: So like that's disturbing and kind of grim to me
Speaker 1: that it's it's literally everyone with everything has just turned
Speaker 1: into Alex Jones. And it's like, yeah, you know, I
Speaker 1: think the motivation for that on all the sides, there's
Speaker 1: definitely like a core of legitimate belief that because the
Speaker 1: Feds infiltrating the FEDS have infiltrated a lot of fascist groups,
Speaker 1: and the FEDS have you know, had a history of
Speaker 1: infiltrating left wing groups and whatnot, Like the Feds have
Speaker 1: done a lot of this stuff, so that makes some
Speaker 1: people paranoid. But also I think if you are on
Speaker 1: the grifter end of things, right, and you want to
Speaker 1: talk about this stuff, but you don't actually want uh
Speaker 1: to put yourself at risk, Um, that's an easy way
Speaker 1: to kind of divorce your listeners and supporters and stuff
Speaker 1: from the stuff that's potentially illegal is by saying, well,
Speaker 1: that's all the Feds. Um. Yeah. And I think also
Speaker 1: especially like I think people are I don't know, it's
Speaker 1: more frustrating on the left because people do it with
Speaker 1: stuff that like the PR is actually pretty good. But
Speaker 1: like with people on the right, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: like this has become one of their sort of like
Speaker 1: pr management things of like anytime something looks bad for them, no,
Speaker 1: it was the Feds, and it's like no. And I
Speaker 1: don't think that's on the right at least I think
Speaker 1: it's there. I think there's more legitimate belief that it's
Speaker 1: the FEDS on folks in the left to do this. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think on the right it is nearly always just
Speaker 1: like this is how you do damage control, Like this
Speaker 1: is how we this is how we distract from the
Speaker 1: fact that our guys keep carrying out attacks or whatever,
Speaker 1: or in this case that our our dudes are profoundly embarrassing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: um is you is You're like no, that was the
Speaker 1: FBI packing thirty federal agents into the back of a
Speaker 1: U haul and getting arrested by the cord Alone police.
Speaker 1: A classic FBI if I've ever seen what my favorite
Speaker 1: one of those people who like, you're never going to
Speaker 1: see the names of any of these people, like literally
Speaker 1: two hours later, every single person got booked, all of
Speaker 1: their names, of their names, every newspaper and it is again,
Speaker 1: this does show you how the quarter Aline police don't
Speaker 1: want people coming in from out of town to funk
Speaker 1: with people who live in cort Aline. That's not a
Speaker 1: them being woke. They like nobody no cops like that
Speaker 1: sort of ship. Yeah, yeah, like yeah, yeah, these guys
Speaker 1: are these guys are at the hometown fascist right, like
Speaker 1: they're they're fine with Yeah, they're finely exactly Biblical basis
Speaker 1: award dude, just like yeah, but these are like, these
Speaker 1: are weird out of town fascists and it's like, yeah, cops,
Speaker 1: I don't know there. Yeah, And it's they're very territorial.
Speaker 1: One of the one of the ways you can see
Speaker 1: the territoriality is like the first thing the quarter Aline
Speaker 1: police do is be like, oh, we're going to give
Speaker 1: everyone's name and where they live. Like we're doing that immediately.
Speaker 1: And of course the the backlash to that from the
Speaker 1: fascist has been that now a bunch of fascists are
Speaker 1: doxing and calling in death threats to Quarterline cops. Um.
Speaker 1: Which again there's this open question of like, are any
Speaker 1: of these charges gonna stick for Patriot Front. The fact
Speaker 1: that an organized flood of death threats is going in
Speaker 1: for the police charging them is not good for their cases.
Speaker 1: Oh no, they're just they're just it's like, guys, guys,
Speaker 1: some free cop advice for me. Cops don't like getting
Speaker 1: death threats, so that that really makes them angry. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: so that's funny. I don't know what else to say
Speaker 1: about it. Uh, it is pretty funny. Um. There's aspect
Speaker 1: again the broader problem of there were a bunch of
Speaker 1: dudes with a RS showing up to to threaten um
Speaker 1: a pride gathering was not fun, although also a lot
Speaker 1: of folks showed up to defend and support those people. Um.
Speaker 1: And I I think I think also like from from
Speaker 1: what I'm from they're putting. This is like one of
Speaker 1: the largest part events I've ever had, So like I
Speaker 1: think we're about people. Yeah, yeah, people. People aren't being
Speaker 1: like as an intimidation tactic. It's not working. It does
Speaker 1: not have worked. Yeah, it's it's it's it's it's work.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's working in so far as it's it's
Speaker 1: you know, it's further radicalizing the right. But like it's not.
Speaker 1: It hasn't gotten to the point where, like I don't know,
Speaker 1: people like it hasn't gone to the point where like
Speaker 1: these things just are like Pride events just aren't happening
Speaker 1: because there because the threat is great enough. So yeah,
Speaker 1: and I I would say, broadly speaking, if you kind
Speaker 1: of look at all of the things that we saw
Speaker 1: in the quarterly event, it's some more more positive signs.
Speaker 1: The negative ones. Um, the negative stuff is stuff that
Speaker 1: we have seen a lot before. The militia ship um,
Speaker 1: the folks rallying to defend those people, the people turning
Speaker 1: up for the Pride event, Um, that's all positive. And
Speaker 1: of course the most prominent fascists at the event embarrassing themselves.
Speaker 1: Like that's positive. So I am I feel I I
Speaker 1: do feel like we were all worried over here about
Speaker 1: how the event in Quarterline was going to go. I
Speaker 1: feel really good about how it it went, which is
Speaker 1: not too especially I know that there's folks from Quarterline.
Speaker 1: They're not to minimize the problems and the threats faced,
Speaker 1: especially from people in Idaho, because boy, that is rough
Speaker 1: territory to be organizing in defense of LGBT people. UM,
Speaker 1: but I I think, broadly speaking, more good news than
Speaker 1: bad news from from Quarterline. So I wanna give our
Speaker 1: appreciation and thanks to the folks who showed up in
Speaker 1: Quarterline UM to support this event to confront the fascists. UM,
Speaker 1: y'all are awesome and doing something difficult in a place
Speaker 1: that need you to be doing that. So thank you.
Speaker 1: Here we go it could happen here podcast where our
Speaker 1: intros get increasingly more segmented as you've realized we have
Speaker 1: no idea who was going to do the intro. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we've never, at no point during the existence of this
Speaker 1: show or its growth, have we have we planned a
Speaker 1: single thing or talked about how to do our jobs.
Speaker 1: I've never. I don't even know who who we who
Speaker 1: we are? UM, we are all meeting for the first time. Um,
Speaker 1: I have that disease that Adam Sandler has or what's
Speaker 1: her name has in that Adam Sandler movie where he forgets,
Speaker 1: she forgets everything every day. That's me. But Drew Baron
Speaker 1: wore is that? That's right? That's right, Cherie Drew anymore,
Speaker 1: I forgot I forgot it. But I can just is
Speaker 1: the same thing as a memento, because that's all I
Speaker 1: can think of. Yes, Sandler and Memento. Yes, Adam Sandler's
Speaker 1: Memento my favorite movie. Well, we should probably introduce the
Speaker 1: episode today. Yeah, so it's me. It's just for Wong.
Speaker 1: And today we're doing an episode that is uh, you know, okay,
Speaker 1: we we we've we've we've we've been forced feeding you
Speaker 1: really grim stuff for a long time. So today we
Speaker 1: working to an episode about southern colonialism and politics and
Speaker 1: board games because that's also extremely cool and it does
Speaker 1: not I mean, it is kind of depressing, but it
Speaker 1: involves less doom than normal. And yeah, and with me
Speaker 1: talk about this that it is is Sharine or our
Speaker 1: wonderful producer who also writes for us, and it is
Speaker 1: great and we love thanks, I'm here. Yeah, and Robert
Speaker 1: who we we tolerate. H Oh, that's nice to you.
Speaker 1: You shouldn't, but we do. Kyle, it's nice to meet you. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And also we have Kyle from Strange Matters. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: I'm Kyle Flannery. I'm my editor and co owner of
Speaker 1: Strange Matters magazine. A. I guess we technically have now launched,
Speaker 1: even with the print issues are not in people's hands.
Speaker 1: A new leftist culture and politics magazine here to be,
Speaker 1: uh the consulting super nerd h awesome. Yeah, I am
Speaker 1: very sad. I mean, well, okay, I feel like weirdly
Speaker 1: for a group of people that I'm in, I have
Speaker 1: probably played the least board games of anyone here, which
Speaker 1: is Yeah. So when when I was a kid, my
Speaker 1: my board game was Risk. Yeah, I did a bunch
Speaker 1: of others. I played like hero Quest and obviously Access,
Speaker 1: and I'll say I say I played Access and Allies.
Speaker 1: I set up Access and Allies forwards many a time,
Speaker 1: and then gave up after like fifteen minutes of playing game.
Speaker 1: I mean that's that's how. That's how I here. Request, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I was like a Request rule book and I
Speaker 1: was like, I have no idea what's going on here?
Speaker 1: Like ten but no, specifically my fucking thing. We would
Speaker 1: speech and debate tournaments. You know, because when you do it,
Speaker 1: you're basically out for a whole weekend, sometimes three days,
Speaker 1: sometimes like four, um, and you're basically living in this school.
Speaker 1: But but you have like maybe one or two hours
Speaker 1: of stuff per day and the rest of the time
Speaker 1: you're just hanging around hearing how your friends are doing.
Speaker 1: Is like, the competition goes on and we would play
Speaker 1: epic specifically Lord of the Rings Risk. We would have
Speaker 1: these massive risk games. Oh I have Yeah, I have
Speaker 1: very good memories playing Lord of the Rings risk with
Speaker 1: my friends. Yeah, I just had the normal vanilla risk. Wow,
Speaker 1: I was really missing out. I just think remember being
Speaker 1: at a bachelor party where after we finished all the
Speaker 1: normal bachelor party stuff, we crawled back to the place
Speaker 1: where everybody's gonna camp out for the night, and so
Speaker 1: we managed to convince one of the other groomsmen that
Speaker 1: a game of risk when he takes about an hour,
Speaker 1: he did this like this, like it was like three
Speaker 1: in the morning. Yeah, it was the wedding that day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was like three on the day of the wedding.
Speaker 1: It was an act of extraordinary cruelty. Anyway, he didn't
Speaker 1: get married, but he didn't take Comchotka, which is really
Speaker 1: key to his his plans to assault North America. We
Speaker 1: we we shockingly did all make it to the wedding,
Speaker 1: which was very much a risk, very much a risk. Yeah,
Speaker 1: very much a risk. Uh. Yeah, that's why it's called that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I was. I was smart enough to just go, no,
Speaker 1: I'm going to bed. I'm not doing three am risk.
Speaker 1: That's not happy. But yeah, I guess to kind of
Speaker 1: back up in front a little bit of context about
Speaker 1: why I kind of thought this was so worth talking about,
Speaker 1: because I'm guessing that there's some readers at home who
Speaker 1: are having a very common thought, which is, why why
Speaker 1: are you talking about board games? Like who cares? Um?
Speaker 1: And you know, I'm reminded little bit of the little
Speaker 1: tweet joke from a while ago of a couple of
Speaker 1: years ago. I'm gona talk about a little while ago
Speaker 1: of on Star Trek they have the uh you know,
Speaker 1: they've got there what do they call that? The Holi Deck? Uh?
Speaker 1: They about the Holi Deck. And but for some reason,
Speaker 1: every week everybody's into some weird new board game. What
Speaker 1: the hell is going on? With that. Uh. And for
Speaker 1: the people who aren't aware of this kind of sector
Speaker 1: of nerddom, board games are actually massively more popular than
Speaker 1: they were when I was a child, when osmlenules were young.
Speaker 1: And a large part of that point has actually been
Speaker 1: from game developers themselves. Uh. The people who make your
Speaker 1: video games absolutely fucking love board games. Uh. And it's
Speaker 1: for a pretty simple reason, which is that you know,
Speaker 1: all of the rules to the game. Board games are
Speaker 1: naked before your eyes. You have you have stripped them
Speaker 1: down to their their atomic components before you have done anything.
Speaker 1: And that means that if you are interested in the
Speaker 1: art of how a game works, uh, they're actually wonderful
Speaker 1: case studies because you can see very quickly the way
Speaker 1: that you move from what the mechanic is doing to
Speaker 1: like what it means. Whereas in a video game that
Speaker 1: can be a lot more obscure, it can be a
Speaker 1: lot more complicated, and it requires it can require a
Speaker 1: lot of digging. You don't have to. You know, I
Speaker 1: am enough of a turb owner that I have broken
Speaker 1: into the game's files for video various video games I've
Speaker 1: played and ripped out the code and looked at it
Speaker 1: and been like, so that's the drop rate because again
Speaker 1: I'm a consulting turb owner here. But with the board game,
Speaker 1: you don't have to do that. You just know all
Speaker 1: of the rules upfront. Uh, and so you know if
Speaker 1: you're uh and so that that's you know, reveal, I
Speaker 1: can reveal a lot about what the designer's intentions are,
Speaker 1: what they're communicating, and how that communication all works. So
Speaker 1: that's that was kind of my start point here. Should
Speaker 1: I just keep on going and explain what the hell
Speaker 1: is going on with this article that I'm about? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I was going to note that the primary
Speaker 1: board game played in Star Trek T and G was
Speaker 1: was was Stratagema in the uh, the classic episode in
Speaker 1: which data has to get really good at what is
Speaker 1: basically holographic chess. Um. Yes, anyway, you talked about Star
Speaker 1: Trek the next generation. So now that's that's all. That's
Speaker 1: good the way to get to the awful board games
Speaker 1: from d S nine. Oh god, yeah, there's I mean,
Speaker 1: Strategy M is pretty ridiculous and the episode is very silly,
Speaker 1: but it's it's one of the more fun data episodes.
Speaker 1: Episode from d S nine I think is only considered
Speaker 1: the worst episode in all of d S nine. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there's I think the worst episode of Star
Speaker 1: Trek the Next Generation is not the board game, but
Speaker 1: it's the one where Riker and his dad fight in
Speaker 1: what's basically American gladiator, you do, where they have to
Speaker 1: have the bandit sticks that they have to fight the
Speaker 1: ultimate martial art. Anyway, please continue, So so talk. So
Speaker 1: I wrote this article that has is upcoming in publication.
Speaker 1: It's going to be in our first issue, uh, And
Speaker 1: it's about a particular trend that I noticed in board
Speaker 1: games that there were a lot of board games that
Speaker 1: were in terms of what was actually going on on
Speaker 1: the board, they were incredibly violent, but they managed to
Speaker 1: make it look like there was no violence going on.
Speaker 1: And so I actually I'm grateful for Robert for talking
Speaker 1: about the games that you talked about, you know, Access
Speaker 1: and Allies and Risk. Uh, even like Monopoly, these are
Speaker 1: games that are in was generally known as the American tradition,
Speaker 1: where the goal is to eliminate all the opposing players
Speaker 1: to be the last last one standing. Yes, like everything
Speaker 1: in American it is like one person wins by using
Speaker 1: either violence or capitalism on the you you survive, you
Speaker 1: outsurvive all of your opponents. Uh, because that was what
Speaker 1: we do in America. We just survive. We just pray
Speaker 1: to God that there is somehow at tomorrow and by God,
Speaker 1: they're going to take Comchatka. Political stance as an American
Speaker 1: is that we will take the Comchatka Peninsula and we're
Speaker 1: going to take Australia. For those three extra armies that
Speaker 1: Australia strategies, I feel like half the risk strategy, half
Speaker 1: the experience I saw, were just waste to nerve the
Speaker 1: Australia strategy. Uh. But um, in any event, that there's
Speaker 1: a European tradition. Uh. And one of the things, and
Speaker 1: that has been a lot that has been very popular
Speaker 1: has made an absolute shitload of money over the last
Speaker 1: several years, shipload being very relative because again, board games
Speaker 1: are pretty small field compared to video games or gambling
Speaker 1: or booze or something like that. Um even kind of
Speaker 1: the dominant name in the game. And Uh. One of
Speaker 1: the kind of major conceits of this style game is
Speaker 1: you don't elimit other players, all players. Any player who
Speaker 1: starts the game at the table is going to end
Speaker 1: the game at the table. You you never limited anybody,
Speaker 1: and this is I think an admirable enough goal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's one of the things that's annoying about a lot
Speaker 1: of games is like if you're trying to do a
Speaker 1: party thing and people are getting eliminated. Although it can
Speaker 1: be fun, if everyone is drinking at the same time
Speaker 1: and while you play the game, people get eliminated and
Speaker 1: then get drunker and heckle everyone else at the table,
Speaker 1: that's actually not bad. That's actually not bad. I remember
Speaker 1: it being like middle school in high school, where you
Speaker 1: just have somebody sitting there bitterly four hours. Well, you
Speaker 1: try to clean up a risk game. Um. Anyway, the
Speaker 1: one that most people are probably the one that is
Speaker 1: the most famous infamous is Sellers of katan Um, and
Speaker 1: that's kind of what's my start point. Sellers of katan
Speaker 1: Is is a board game where you play as European
Speaker 1: colonizers to a almost uninhabited island and almost uninhabited island,
Speaker 1: and you cannot damage the other players directly. There is
Speaker 1: no mechanism for doing this. You can block them off
Speaker 1: from building things, you can never send him. I always
Speaker 1: go hard on the roads. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can
Speaker 1: block people with roads. It's a very like it's kind
Speaker 1: of like like about like a rivalry between developers almost.
Speaker 1: But one of the things that that is kind of
Speaker 1: outstanding about this is that, uh, it's not a technically
Speaker 1: on inhabit island. There is a quote robber that starts
Speaker 1: out on the island, uh, and the robbert is capable
Speaker 1: of inflicting violence on the players and it can be
Speaker 1: sort of controlled by the players. And so the part
Speaker 1: that was again striking to me about this is you
Speaker 1: can't directly, you know, if this would actually be the
Speaker 1: right number players of me, Chris, Sherne, and Robert were
Speaker 1: all sitting at a table playing out of Katan. I
Speaker 1: could not eliminate any of them. None of them could
Speaker 1: eliminate me. We could not harm each other directly. We
Speaker 1: can just negotiate with each other, we can trade with
Speaker 1: each other, but there is still ultimately a winner. And uh,
Speaker 1: you know this is if you are willing to make
Speaker 1: some some kind of specific historical amnesia about how colonials
Speaker 1: I'm actually operated where you know, like wars of colonial
Speaker 1: aggression also included like wars in Germany like the Seven
Speaker 1: Years War, or you know, the wars of Spanish succession,
Speaker 1: we're all happening at the same time, but you can,
Speaker 1: you know, it can be viewed as similar to that,
Speaker 1: and again it has this explicit theming, and that is
Speaker 1: I do think that those things, those things are devetailing together,
Speaker 1: right that the only people who are real people are
Speaker 1: the colonizers. The colonized are non agent Dick, They're just set,
Speaker 1: they're they're they're setting. Um. And the more you think
Speaker 1: about it, it's just it's just kind of messed up.
Speaker 1: It's it's just kind of, uh, it's kind of messed up.
Speaker 1: And I do think it's kind of interesting that the
Speaker 1: game doesn't really say this very explicitly, right um. And
Speaker 1: I know, I know there's going to be somebody's going
Speaker 1: to say, oh, you know, the game says rob or
Speaker 1: it doesn't say Native American. How can you know? It's like,
Speaker 1: come on, man, if you watched a movie where there
Speaker 1: was some there was a group of people in the
Speaker 1: movie who were portrayed as violent and incapable of acting
Speaker 1: on their own, and all of these racist tropes, even
Speaker 1: if they were not played by Native American actor, even
Speaker 1: if they didn't use an explicit Native American references, if
Speaker 1: all of the good guys are people who dispossessed this person,
Speaker 1: you know what's going on. People don't look at the
Speaker 1: tempest and they see Caliban and go, this person has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with the Americans that yeah, yeah, they're
Speaker 1: making him uncivilized, like it like civility or like civilians
Speaker 1: in general, they come from somewhere else and they inhabit
Speaker 1: the place. But yeah, you're right, like just like Columbus
Speaker 1: discovered America, the natives are based like it's it's it's
Speaker 1: a blank slate as far as white settlers are concerned,
Speaker 1: and like the positionality of like like the game is
Speaker 1: very explicit about who is a settler and who is not. Right,
Speaker 1: the settlers are you and everyone else playing the game,
Speaker 1: and then you have the other person who's on the
Speaker 1: island who got here before you. And it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean the name is pretty blunt, like you are,
Speaker 1: like you know, there's no I don't know. It's it's
Speaker 1: very it's very hard to evade. And you know, like
Speaker 1: you can see the art from the game, like it's
Speaker 1: all white people, uh, and it's it's it's kind of
Speaker 1: interesting cause in the first edition printing, they're all kind
Speaker 1: of medieval, but in later editions they're like colonial America.
Speaker 1: Like it's I don't think it's like it requires some
Speaker 1: very deliberate obtuseness to miss that this is what it's
Speaker 1: going on. Um and uh so anyway that has um
Speaker 1: that was that was released like twenty something years ago. Uh.
Speaker 1: I find it very funny that sellers of Katan managed
Speaker 1: to win Game of the Year awards in both two
Speaker 1: thousand and five. Like it hasn't changed, mud, I don't know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: those those are different years, like what's going on? Definitely, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they did add boats. They did add boats. That's true.
Speaker 1: You're not You're not wrong about you don't you don't
Speaker 1: you don't have boats? Come on, that's true. Actually, it's funny.
Speaker 1: My neighbors have a boat. I do not have a
Speaker 1: boat because I'm a regular person who doesn't have lived
Speaker 1: next to a lake. M hm oh yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: also do not have a boat. So yeah, I briefly
Speaker 1: had a commute to work that I could have kayaked,
Speaker 1: but I don't know to kayak. That's New York baby.
Speaker 1: I developed a desire to have a boat last year
Speaker 1: because I yeah, I was in Spain and I met
Speaker 1: a Spanish guy with a boat, and that does seem
Speaker 1: like the life. But that's not you're you're, you're, you're
Speaker 1: horrible descend into turning into some sort of Hemmingway adjacent character. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just just I mean it is it is nice to
Speaker 1: be drunk on about. It's also very expensive to have
Speaker 1: a boat, so maybe I'll get drunk on an inflatable
Speaker 1: raft instead. Yeah, I just get a sunfish and just
Speaker 1: flip it over every thirty seconds. Um, the working man's boat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the working man's boat. Um. But yeah, and uh so
Speaker 1: so from there, I kind of what has happened is
Speaker 1: unsurprisingly that you know, board games are actually kind of
Speaker 1: a summat demographic art form compared to video games, because
Speaker 1: all you really needed some paper, Like really, that's all
Speaker 1: you need. You need some paper. Uh, And you can
Speaker 1: make a board game, uh if you have tabletop simulator.
Speaker 1: You just need tabletop simulator. You're already done, like uh,
Speaker 1: and then you just need to be able to bully
Speaker 1: people into play testing your game. And that's really the
Speaker 1: hard part. Uh. But you know, so list means that
Speaker 1: you know, people will iterate on thing pretty quickly. You know,
Speaker 1: it's very like fan fiction environment people will will iterate
Speaker 1: rather quickly on your ideas and develop them further. Um.
Speaker 1: And so I looked through some of the other games
Speaker 1: that I've played and liked, and uh, you know, I
Speaker 1: actually tend to like pretty much all the games that
Speaker 1: I studied. Uh, Splendor is the one that is very fun,
Speaker 1: very casual, very easy, and it just says this art
Speaker 1: that bugs me, this art that really bugs me, where
Speaker 1: it's about being a gem trader, and it's very much
Speaker 1: seems to be based on Renaissance Italy or like Renaissance
Speaker 1: on TWERP. You know this and m for some reason,
Speaker 1: like you don't see people in minds. It's very weird.
Speaker 1: All of the there will be pictures of minds. It's like, okay,
Speaker 1: you bought this emerald mind and there's like nobody there,
Speaker 1: which is very weird because I have seen pictures of
Speaker 1: pre industrial I've seen pictures of minds from the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: which is firmly industrial where there are thousands of people
Speaker 1: you can barely see the ground, you know, thousands of
Speaker 1: people everywhere. You know, mining is very labor intensive. Um.
Speaker 1: You only start seeing mining become kind of like capital intensive,
Speaker 1: like very recently, and even then only really in the
Speaker 1: United States and a couple of other countries. Germany obviously
Speaker 1: uses very capital intensive mining. Everywhere else it's very very
Speaker 1: labor intensive, but splendor. They won't show you the people
Speaker 1: doing the mining, but they will show you the people
Speaker 1: short uh sorting the gems, which is they're skipping the
Speaker 1: slavery part exactly, exactly the part there skipping. Yeah, even today,
Speaker 1: like you ignore what your how your cell phone is made, right,
Speaker 1: You're just like you're glossing over the unflattering parts and
Speaker 1: going straight to making a gym. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're
Speaker 1: you're going straight to you know, I've I've you know,
Speaker 1: I've got my my pretty purple cell phone, you know.
Speaker 1: And the the part where you know there was yeah,
Speaker 1: pretty much of war in the Congo fought over it
Speaker 1: and then they had to install suicide nets in China
Speaker 1: gets completely glossed over and that all that stuff goes
Speaker 1: into this phone. But uh, you know, to me, it's
Speaker 1: just kind of a necessary hunk of plastic and metal
Speaker 1: for surviving in America. Um, and I you know, I'm
Speaker 1: not entirely I don't want to be too hard on
Speaker 1: the designers here. It's very like there's a part of
Speaker 1: me that wants to me and there's a part of
Speaker 1: me that wants to be kind of forgiving and being
Speaker 1: like do you really want to be playing this like
Speaker 1: fun casual game and like be confronted with slavery? Uh
Speaker 1: But at the same time, like yeah, you you really
Speaker 1: try to have it both ways here, Like this is
Speaker 1: like I don't make the game about something actually fun,
Speaker 1: not yeah, not something that well. I mean there are
Speaker 1: there and there are people who do that. You know,
Speaker 1: It's like not that hard to find people like making
Speaker 1: games about like theme parks or like haunted houses or
Speaker 1: utopian or like like weird like utopian arcologies and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. Like people make these things. But like so this,
Speaker 1: this colonialism keeps on like coming back, and part of that,
Speaker 1: you know, part of that is I guess, like all
Speaker 1: sci fi is kind of colonialist. But wait, before we go,
Speaker 1: do you know what else keeps coming back? You know what?
Speaker 1: Tell me what? Sure? You? Capitalism? It's time for an
Speaker 1: ad break and there's still more capitalism, but that capitalism,
Speaker 1: that's true, that's different capitalism. Yeah, right now we're we're
Speaker 1: in like more early capitalism. And uh so the the
Speaker 1: game that like really stuck in like for all the
Speaker 1: weirdest and uh, I might end up reading a quote
Speaker 1: out from here. I'm sorry for being an incredibly irritating
Speaker 1: person and doing that. As a game called Mombassa, um
Speaker 1: and uh, Mombassa is so aggressive about how colonialist it is.
Speaker 1: It is so so aggressive. The premise of the game
Speaker 1: is that you are adventurers in the Scramble for Africa
Speaker 1: and the goal is to be the player who retires
Speaker 1: the richest um. And the ways in which the mechanics
Speaker 1: of this game are messed up, uh, the part of
Speaker 1: the mechanics that I will say is genuinely clever. And
Speaker 1: if they hadn't made it about the Scramble for Africa,
Speaker 1: I would have like no, I would just be like, yeah, cool.
Speaker 1: So I still have to admit that this is This
Speaker 1: is cool. Is that you start out working for a
Speaker 1: different joint stock company, but anybody can buy shares in
Speaker 1: anybody else's joint stock company. So the best strategy is
Speaker 1: to buy somebody else's company and then they make the
Speaker 1: company valuable and you contribute as little as possible. Free
Speaker 1: rider problem. You know the classic of game theory that
Speaker 1: the liberal economists fucking love talking about Uh, great thing
Speaker 1: to do with the game. But the way you make
Speaker 1: your company valuable is like it's it's pillaging Africa. Like
Speaker 1: it's pillaging Africa, and it's it's very very weird. Like
Speaker 1: there's do you have this map of Africa in front
Speaker 1: of you, and the map of Africa has valuable things
Speaker 1: in it has you know, dime that you can pick up.
Speaker 1: It has Like there are books, which is unclear if
Speaker 1: that represents, like you write an adventure novel like King
Speaker 1: Solomon's Minds, or you write a naturalist guide, or you
Speaker 1: write an ethnography, but you're writing some sort of book
Speaker 1: is based on how you despoiled the African continent. Uh.
Speaker 1: And what what always struck me as so weird is
Speaker 1: that the territory is just when you enter the territory,
Speaker 1: you just take everything. You just you just pillage it.
Speaker 1: It's not like territory that you hold and really make
Speaker 1: more productive. You don't develop it. There's at least it's
Speaker 1: honest about that to a certain extent. At least it's
Speaker 1: honest that like the Europeans were lying about any of
Speaker 1: that development civilizing mission ship, like that they were there
Speaker 1: to steal um and but what is so so weird
Speaker 1: to me about it is that like there's there's no resistance,
Speaker 1: there's no risk to expanding across the continent, there's no negotiation.
Speaker 1: The only other characters at all are the other players,
Speaker 1: other Europeans. Uh. You know this continent that at the
Speaker 1: time had hundreds of millions of people, uh, many of
Speaker 1: whom had legitimate kingdoms, that in some parts of Africa
Speaker 1: where you know, had full gunpowder militaries just totally glossed over,
Speaker 1: just totally not not mechanically represented at all. Um Well,
Speaker 1: it's like they're only they're portraying the only future that
Speaker 1: that is possible. Like you know what I mean, this
Speaker 1: is how you become a civilization. There's no other that
Speaker 1: there's one path. Um well, I mean it is. There
Speaker 1: is one path to being a civilization, and it does
Speaker 1: involve a lot of taking other people ship. To be fair, No,
Speaker 1: I said that ironically, Robert, I know, I said in
Speaker 1: their mind there is one path. Yes, But I do
Speaker 1: feel like I've got to read this out from the
Speaker 1: rule book because it was like so hypopic to me.
Speaker 1: This is this is from the rule book. This is
Speaker 1: the start of the rule book the opening quote. In Mombassa,
Speaker 1: players acquire shares of chartered companies based in Mombassa, Cape
Speaker 1: Town St. Louis and Cairo and spread their tailing paths
Speaker 1: throughout the African content in order to earn the most money.
Speaker 1: Chartered companies were associations formed for the purpose of exploration, trade,
Speaker 1: and colonization, which links them inextricably to a very dark
Speaker 1: shapter in human history, global colonialism. This period rough lasted
Speaker 1: roughly from the fifteenth century to the middle of the
Speaker 1: twentieth century and is associated with exploitation and slavery. Although
Speaker 1: Mombasa is loosely set within this timeframe, it is not
Speaker 1: a historical simulation. Is a strategy game with an economic
Speaker 1: focus that roughly refers to historical categories and places them
Speaker 1: in a fictional setting. The exploitation of the African continent
Speaker 1: and its people is not explicitly depicted within the gameplay.
Speaker 1: If you want to learn more about the underlying history,
Speaker 1: we recommend the following read History of Modern Africa Each
Speaker 1: hundred de pressent by Richard J. Reid uh End quote.
Speaker 1: So they fucking new, but like they fucking knew that
Speaker 1: this was some evil evil ship that they have made
Speaker 1: into a game, and they want you to know that
Speaker 1: they knew that you that you were going to call it.
Speaker 1: It's like making like a candy Land version set in
Speaker 1: the Congo where you have to call up hands or
Speaker 1: rubber and being like, yeah, you can read a book
Speaker 1: about this if you want. Yeah, this is like it's
Speaker 1: such a cop out. It's like it's so bizarre, Like
Speaker 1: it's so bizarry not how many people even read this stuff,
Speaker 1: like like generously. One person I've ever before reads the
Speaker 1: rule book when you're wearing a board game, like like
Speaker 1: very generously. Like I'm just a huge nerd who likes
Speaker 1: reading this stuff, and I would just like read this
Speaker 1: in my jaw, was just like, holy shit, I think
Speaker 1: you could try. It might even be wisdom and trying
Speaker 1: to like make a board game about the Scramble for
Speaker 1: Africa that's like framed in like a kid friendly way,
Speaker 1: but is also like very blatantly horrific. It's just like
Speaker 1: the kind of thing that if you think about it
Speaker 1: ten seconds, I was like, Oh, we're just like subjugating
Speaker 1: and massacreing people. But it's also like the the art
Speaker 1: style is like themed off of Candy land or some
Speaker 1: sort of ship like maybe, but even then you're probably
Speaker 1: more likely to just get people enjoying it on ironically
Speaker 1: than you are to actually convince anybody to read about
Speaker 1: the Scramble for Africa. Well yeah, yeah, I mean, and
Speaker 1: well it's actually kind of interesting because there's there's like
Speaker 1: a good tradition of like making like kid friendly appearing
Speaker 1: things that are actually quite horrifying if you think about
Speaker 1: them more than two seconds. And yeah, well Monopoly for example.
Speaker 1: And I mean I was going to take a slight
Speaker 1: turn away from board games. I grew up with red
Speaker 1: the Red Wall books. Yes, yeah, the Red Wall books.
Speaker 1: Like even though like stoats are not a race of
Speaker 1: people in real life, they are a type of weasel. Uh,
Speaker 1: holy ship, those books managed to be incredibly racist. It
Speaker 1: really is racist against like different types of weasel. But uh,
Speaker 1: you know, they portrayed this this very cute, cie world
Speaker 1: of you know, animals, you know, malise and badgers and stuff,
Speaker 1: and they're just committing genocide left and right. It's just
Speaker 1: portrayed is like totally okay, it's just like someone who
Speaker 1: has no idea what you're talking about. This is crazy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's popular children's series and like the eighties and nineties,
Speaker 1: you know, I read this books. It was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like you flipped back and forth between like, yeah,
Speaker 1: here is Martin the mouse, and he's the hero, and
Speaker 1: also he's eating all of this really nice food and
Speaker 1: then also we must exterminate like entire species. It's buck wild.
Speaker 1: It is insane. Uh. The Red Wall Feast Spot, by
Speaker 1: the way, it's like a really good Twitter follow. We're
Speaker 1: just post excerpts from the food descriptions. Those are incredible. Um.
Speaker 1: But the reason why I kind of made that turn
Speaker 1: is that one of the games I considered that I
Speaker 1: actually really liked is uh something of a post something
Speaker 1: of an anti colonial game called Root. Uh. And this
Speaker 1: is part of the part of what I was kind
Speaker 1: of witnessing over as I was studying these is that
Speaker 1: there is a bit of a discourse, a bit of
Speaker 1: a development over time. Uh. And Uh. Two of the
Speaker 1: games that I highlighted, Root and Spirit Island are kind
Speaker 1: of are are fairly anti colonial. And Root is a
Speaker 1: kind of horrifying game but with very cute see appearances.
Speaker 1: You know, you play as like mice and cats and
Speaker 1: and birds. Uh. And the birds are like like horrifying aristocrats. Uh,
Speaker 1: like like you're like a feudal military dictatorship. The cats
Speaker 1: are like trying to turn the entire force into like
Speaker 1: a giant woodcutting factory and like subjugate everybody else under
Speaker 1: the boot heel of like industrial capitalism. And you can
Speaker 1: play as just like the concept of revolution, I guess,
Speaker 1: like like there's a woodlanda lions who win the game
Speaker 1: by like provoking revolts of the civilian population to overthrow
Speaker 1: the other two. Uh. It's it's very weird. It's a
Speaker 1: very very violent game by by comparison, it's very hard
Speaker 1: to lend a player in it. But it was kind
Speaker 1: of interesting to me to see that like you can do.
Speaker 1: It's kind of almost see the exact opposite where it's
Speaker 1: like a lot of like it doesn't have. It has
Speaker 1: this very obviously horrifying and graphically violent mechanics, uh you know,
Speaker 1: revolutions and subjugation, but with like the characters look cute,
Speaker 1: like all the all the character art is very cute. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, you've got like a little mice like making
Speaker 1: pungi traps and stuff in the It's very odd. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I kinda, I kinda jumped a little bit ahead here,
Speaker 1: but I don't know that we need to go through
Speaker 1: the everything I did in this in this paper that's
Speaker 1: a little bit boring, and also we need to leave
Speaker 1: thanks for the readers. And actually Root is UH a
Speaker 1: little bit based on a game series that I think
Speaker 1: would be particularly appealing to UH, to Robert Uh and
Speaker 1: possibly the listeners. There's a company called GMT Games. Anybody
Speaker 1: else heard of them? These guys are interesting. Could to you?
Speaker 1: Gim T Games make games like Kuba Libre, a four
Speaker 1: player asymmetric warfare about the Cuban revolution UM, and a
Speaker 1: couple of ways, yes, yes, multiple. I one once as
Speaker 1: the Mafia, which was an interesting side to play in UM,
Speaker 1: an interesting and interesting series of interest to have. You know,
Speaker 1: I could not build an army for ship. I just
Speaker 1: had to count in the fact that other people didn't
Speaker 1: think it was worth destroying casinos because they're too busy
Speaker 1: trying to stamp out revolutionaries UM and or their revolutionaries
Speaker 1: trying to stamp out fascists. And it was a they're
Speaker 1: a very The reason why I think they're very weird
Speaker 1: company is that, you know, I think they're they all
Speaker 1: games like Cuba libre Twilight Struggle A Distant Plane, which
Speaker 1: is about the war in Afghanistan. But they also are
Speaker 1: like these guys are like Quantico psychos. Uh. They actually
Speaker 1: they are the guys who make the actual four war
Speaker 1: games that the Pentagon. Yeah yeah, Quantico, if you're not
Speaker 1: up on things, is like the part of the Virginia
Speaker 1: area kind of a suburb of d C where all
Speaker 1: of the all of like the Fed FEDS live. Like
Speaker 1: I'm not talking about like border patrol FEDS or ship.
Speaker 1: I'm talking like, uh fucking CIA, motherfucker's Capital f Feds. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Isn't the CIA is like training facility there, Yes, they have,
Speaker 1: and I think the FBI also has a facility in quantity,
Speaker 1: the Capital f FEDS agents are there. Yeah. Yeah. Don
Speaker 1: don't think of like like your ocean inspectors here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean look well and also just like we're not
Speaker 1: primarily talking about like the door kickers, We're talking about
Speaker 1: the people who are like the doing the really scary ship.
Speaker 1: You know. I will say, though, if if we gave
Speaker 1: Osha like CIA powers, the world would be in an
Speaker 1: obviously better place. I think we hand them the nukes.
Speaker 1: I think we hand them the nukes and a mandate
Speaker 1: to use them if security procedures aren't followed. Not cleaning
Speaker 1: your counter after using chicken, that's the end of Detroit.
Speaker 1: You know, there goes San Francisco. Uh, you didn't clean
Speaker 1: your food cart well enough, you know, pretty soon, collective
Speaker 1: of punishment, but just for workplace violations. Yeah, collective punishment
Speaker 1: for like basic sanitation violations. I mean, in a way,
Speaker 1: not following sanitation does lead to collective punishment, whether or
Speaker 1: not you have a federal enforcement for it or not.
Speaker 1: That's right, he's the deployment of our nation's nuclear assets. Uh.
Speaker 1: Do you know what else is collective punishment? Capitalism? Yes,
Speaker 1: listening to ads? Yeah, so let's all endure it together.
Speaker 1: We've been collectively punished, solidarities, all all, all of us
Speaker 1: who must endure advertising? Yes, Um, yes, I have been,
Speaker 1: I've been, I'm long a lot and um yeah, Like
Speaker 1: I said, I find this, this question of who gets
Speaker 1: to be an agent to be very important. Who who
Speaker 1: gets to be a player? Who is even given the
Speaker 1: choice of winning? You know if if you're not a player,
Speaker 1: you're completely written off from the possibility of ever winning. Um.
Speaker 1: And you know this is something that like in in
Speaker 1: video games. We've seen recurring debates around this, you know,
Speaker 1: like civilization is an infamous one for this. You know,
Speaker 1: who even gets to be a civilization? Um? Why are
Speaker 1: some civilizations civilizations and some city states and some barbarians? Um?
Speaker 1: And you know it does, uh, you know, it does
Speaker 1: shape your thinking, you know. And there's there's games are
Speaker 1: very valuable for how they create empathy. You know, a
Speaker 1: game that can really immerse you can really teach you
Speaker 1: a lot of very creative and powerful empathy for groups
Speaker 1: of people that you might never have the chance to
Speaker 1: interact with. Ah. And then when you keep on create
Speaker 1: in games that ask you to empathize with the colonizers.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm. Yeah, you think it's just the normal way
Speaker 1: of things. This is what this is what happens. This
Speaker 1: is the succession of events that leads to humans. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this session of events the leads the humans. Those who
Speaker 1: do not participate simply die out. Uh. This iswashing? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah it is, it is. And I mean it's it's
Speaker 1: you know, you can the same could be said of
Speaker 1: all culture. But you know, I think it's worth being
Speaker 1: um informed in critical consumers. UM. And I mean I
Speaker 1: actually do you know. I actually you know, I know
Speaker 1: that you want this to be an uplifting episode. And
Speaker 1: I'm going to be optimistic here, I I you know,
Speaker 1: it's not just that we're talking about software. The stakes
Speaker 1: are not literal deaths. The stakes are you know, getting
Speaker 1: mad at your friends over aboard game. But also I
Speaker 1: do think that, uh, we have seen positive development of
Speaker 1: people taking of people looking at these games. You know,
Speaker 1: there's a game developer who said about some of the games,
Speaker 1: who was playing, what what do the locals think about
Speaker 1: these colonizers? Like, it's pretty rude that nobody's asking them,
Speaker 1: and tried to design starting from there. And I have
Speaker 1: some criticisms of how he executed that, how well he
Speaker 1: executed on that visions. But the fact of matter is
Speaker 1: is that even just through the sheer iteration of somebody
Speaker 1: looking at a game like Settlers of Katan and going, well,
Speaker 1: how can I do this difference? You know, I can't
Speaker 1: just release the same game every single year. I I
Speaker 1: need to do something new, and even just a simple
Speaker 1: one of just reversing who is the players? Simple enough,
Speaker 1: even that has been creating some iteration in some some
Speaker 1: additional complexity which and and has caused people. I have
Speaker 1: seen people, you know, go back and re examine, even
Speaker 1: if they're not people who have any sort of like education,
Speaker 1: any sort of formal education in anthropology of post corneal theory,
Speaker 1: they will they'll look at like, oh, yeah, I was
Speaker 1: playing this game where you're the colonize and I played
Speaker 1: this other game where they reversed the roles, and I
Speaker 1: was like, that was the bad guys earlier. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean I think portray the other side and maybe winning
Speaker 1: means you kick them out or or destroy them. I
Speaker 1: would like to see that play out versus that is
Speaker 1: Spirit Island. That is what Spirit Island is, that the
Speaker 1: players cooperate to destroy the colonizers or to terrorize them
Speaker 1: into abandoning the island. Uh. Weird game. Weird game. I
Speaker 1: have some I think there's some good execution. There is
Speaker 1: some critics and I've got some criticisms of it is
Speaker 1: my favorite, but it does do some things a little
Speaker 1: bit well patronizing. But um but yeah, like yeah, like
Speaker 1: that's that's something I think is worth seeing and uh,
Speaker 1: and I think it's something that um admittedly, maybe I
Speaker 1: just really enjoyed the space of the world because you know,
Speaker 1: if you look at very mainstream video games, for example,
Speaker 1: kind of bored of the same, like five feeling the
Speaker 1: same five games get released every year, you know, there's
Speaker 1: some texture, Give me something new. But um, also, I
Speaker 1: think that U I think that the I think there's
Speaker 1: some cost for optimism for people like critically examining the
Speaker 1: art that they're building, the art that they're consuming, in
Speaker 1: the art that they're creating. And I don't know that
Speaker 1: counting on that kind of stochastic, bouncy ball randomness of
Speaker 1: people just kind of spontaneously going what if we what
Speaker 1: if we uh played what if we reverse the roles
Speaker 1: in Call of Duty? You know what if we played
Speaker 1: the people living in the fafalo Well, Call of Duty
Speaker 1: is happening on in the background, just kind of on,
Speaker 1: like the randomness of that happening. Uh might not be
Speaker 1: as fast as people want. I wish, I wish. Oh yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: There was a game called I think it was I
Speaker 1: think it was called This Is War. Maybe it's called
Speaker 1: This War of Mine. That's what it was. That's a
Speaker 1: good game. That's a really well done game. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And there's I'm I'm I don't know. I'm excited to
Speaker 1: see the future of all this stuff and excited to
Speaker 1: see where people go with this. Well, Chris, I have
Speaker 1: a question, I did you decide to even bring on Kyle?
Speaker 1: Like what do you what? What is it about this
Speaker 1: topic that you think is prevalent today? What? What what
Speaker 1: can we take away from this? Well? I think I
Speaker 1: don't know. I think one of the things that I
Speaker 1: got was reading the article is about like one of
Speaker 1: the ways, like one of the things you see in
Speaker 1: how settler colonialism gets perpetuated, and I think, um, why
Speaker 1: am I now forgetting the name of the Yeah, declonization
Speaker 1: is not a metaphor. It talks about this a lot,
Speaker 1: which yeah, I'll talk about that another time someday. But
Speaker 1: like one of the things that you get like immediately
Speaker 1: is the sort of is that the settler move to innocence?
Speaker 1: And that strikes me as like the sort of it's
Speaker 1: the kind of like it's it's it's the kind of
Speaker 1: perspective that you see, I think running across all of
Speaker 1: these board games, and I think it it is actually
Speaker 1: really helpful to sort of you know, like the way
Speaker 1: you break that and then the way you start to
Speaker 1: get actually it actually looks like the colonization. It has
Speaker 1: to start with people like actually like realizing what they're
Speaker 1: doing and not being able to sort of like retreat
Speaker 1: to this position of innocence and being sort of confronted
Speaker 1: by it. And I think that like that that is
Speaker 1: a place where media could actually like be very helpful
Speaker 1: because you know, like most and most mostly like it's
Speaker 1: it's it's it's almost always working in the opposite direction, right,
Speaker 1: But it's something where you can actually have this sort
Speaker 1: of I don't know, it's it's a part of the
Speaker 1: cultural spirit where you could like very like very easily
Speaker 1: put someone into a role that is not the one
Speaker 1: that they're normally doing and get them to like realize
Speaker 1: that like what they're doing is like fucked. So yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I could say the first when I was
Speaker 1: in high school and played playing Sellers of Katan for
Speaker 1: the first time, I didn't realize the like it took
Speaker 1: me a while to understand that, like, oh I'm a
Speaker 1: colonial list yeah, territory. Uh, And well because they yeah,
Speaker 1: they present it as default innocence and also just like
Speaker 1: exciting too. There's no there's no backstory to how you
Speaker 1: get the wood or the ore or or anything else.
Speaker 1: You just like somehow build a road, you somehow have
Speaker 1: a town. There is no backstory as to who you're
Speaker 1: destroying in the process. And I think it infiltrates in
Speaker 1: your mind to the point where you subconsciously just deemed
Speaker 1: that as normal. And it's it's definitely not unique, you know,
Speaker 1: it's definitely like it's only just another tendril of reinforcing
Speaker 1: stuff that we hear from the rest of our culture
Speaker 1: so broadly, you know that. Then it's it's just this
Speaker 1: is just one aspect, one expression, I should say, of
Speaker 1: how many millions of different ways we get colonialism reinforced
Speaker 1: to us as a normal, natural part of the world.
Speaker 1: And uh, and you know, from you know, cowboy movies
Speaker 1: to uh to just like the way the New York
Speaker 1: Times will write about who owns land and who's who
Speaker 1: has a who has a viable claim on owning a
Speaker 1: piece of land? Uh, all of that you know, we
Speaker 1: get reinforced was in our fiction are nonfiction every day? Um.
Speaker 1: I guess again that's part of I guess why I
Speaker 1: was drawn to board games in particular for this, because
Speaker 1: it's so transparent, you know, it's so transparent, how all
Speaker 1: how the all the propaganda works like it's not there's
Speaker 1: no movie magic. Yeah, yeah, the rules are all there.
Speaker 1: It's it's pretty much. I don't know, but yeah, but
Speaker 1: you you sympathized with and I didn't know you empathize
Speaker 1: with the colonizer because there who you're who you are. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you want to win, you want to win, you want
Speaker 1: to win. I'm very competitive. You want to win. Um
Speaker 1: and and uh and you know, and they get to
Speaker 1: and the people who may get to have this kind
Speaker 1: of like this course that this kind of badge of
Speaker 1: like oh yeah, we made like the friendly board game.
Speaker 1: You know, they're comparing themselves to you know, making Monopoly,
Speaker 1: where like there's like a chance of a divorce happening
Speaker 1: every time somebody finishes the game of Monopoly. Uh. And
Speaker 1: you know, they get to pursue themselves as the nice ones.
Speaker 1: And it's like, yeah, we're the nice ones because all
Speaker 1: the people who were being mean to don't get a
Speaker 1: voice at all. I just can't believe we made a
Speaker 1: game about paying rent, Like I really cannot believe that.
Speaker 1: I history because it's very funny. I skimmed in your
Speaker 1: in your articles like about it a little bit. But
Speaker 1: it was called something that was much more to the point,
Speaker 1: what was it called The Landlord's Game? Excuse me, yeah,
Speaker 1: the landlords Game by Elizabeth Maggie. She was a Georgist
Speaker 1: activist in the like early twentieth century. Close my mind,
Speaker 1: fucking George's and the whole. I mean, this monopoly monopoly
Speaker 1: being the most relevant contribution of George Is to world
Speaker 1: history is somehow incredibly fitting. Let's all away from it,
Speaker 1: brutal the number one selling economics book of American history.
Speaker 1: Because they're used to a very bad board game, I
Speaker 1: can't say it's unfair, and I guess that that's really
Speaker 1: what I've got is that like it's I think it's
Speaker 1: still I think it's very valuable to UM be a
Speaker 1: critical consumer UM and UM one Boston maybe went over
Speaker 1: the line, But for the most part, these games haven't
Speaker 1: like ruined my ability to enjoy them. If my friends
Speaker 1: want to play a game SLT was on, they might
Speaker 1: just get an annoying lecture from me. But they're going
Speaker 1: to get annoying lecture from me anyway, it just would
Speaker 1: be about something else. I mean, it's like any media.
Speaker 1: It's like phil and TV or whatever. You're going to
Speaker 1: realize eventually that you should be conscious of what you're consuming.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I'll still get into arguments about all those things,
Speaker 1: except for except for podcasts. People should blindly consume our
Speaker 1: podcast I mean, I mean, yes, podcasts are the only
Speaker 1: true for was hearing an art form. That's right, that's right.
Speaker 1: As Karl Mark said, listen to this podcast like can
Speaker 1: the subscribe, share us on Facebook? And then and then
Speaker 1: eventually one day podcast will wither away into bolish itself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right, that's right, classic Marxist podcast theory. That's right,
Speaker 1: that's right. Is that the episode Well, Kyle, where can
Speaker 1: people find you? Yes? I I personally am notoriously hard
Speaker 1: to find on the internet, being a person who doesn't
Speaker 1: have any social media whatsoever. Absolutely the right call. I
Speaker 1: I have been off of Twitter for a couple of days.
Speaker 1: I'm taking a break, and the best best decision you
Speaker 1: could make get away from all that. Our our publication
Speaker 1: is at Strange Matters dot co op. We worked hard
Speaker 1: to get that dot co op registration. Uh. We just
Speaker 1: published on Thursday a couple of days ago, Love as
Speaker 1: a Verb in article reviewing UH and um Extrand expanding
Speaker 1: the possibilities of bell Hooks all about Love two thousand
Speaker 1: books all about Love, which is worth reading both the
Speaker 1: both the review and the book. Yeah. I actually just
Speaker 1: finished it, um four hours ago. Yeah, I heard up
Speaker 1: for the first time during the pandemic. It was Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's in Lightning read, It's in Lightning read. Uh. We
Speaker 1: we tend to have a lot of really insane economics
Speaker 1: stuff if you want to like read some truly insane
Speaker 1: ship about money, about where money comes from and what
Speaker 1: money is and what we can do about money. Uh,
Speaker 1: we've oh boy, we've got you covered. Uh we have
Speaker 1: we have a profile of Roberts where we have rendered
Speaker 1: him as Baron Munchausen very flatteringly. Uh. A really wonderful
Speaker 1: review of three different cyberpunk works by the wonderful anti
Speaker 1: fascist author Elizabeth Sanderford. Um. Yeah, so come come check
Speaker 1: us out at Strange Matters dot co opt. H if
Speaker 1: for we are we are taking new writers all the time. Uh,
Speaker 1: and we've got submission gidelines on there. And uh, if
Speaker 1: you want to personally send me hate mail for besmirching
Speaker 1: the good honor of settlers of Katan, I can be
Speaker 1: reached at Kyle at Strange Matters dot co op. Yeah. Oh,
Speaker 1: and we do have a Twitter for the for the company? Yeah,
Speaker 1: what's your what's the Twitter for the company? It is
Speaker 1: Strange Underscore Matters perfectly, Thanks Kyle. Check out Strange Matters
Speaker 1: contribute to their fundraiser. I can't I can't recommend doing
Speaker 1: anything on Twitter, so I simply uh and thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you for having me on again. It's a it
Speaker 1: was a lovely time. Yeah, absolutely all right. Again, as
Speaker 1: as as with every episode, go with christ Hello, welcome
Speaker 1: to it could happen here. This is part two of
Speaker 1: I guess two part series about Dallas, Texas. Finally we're
Speaker 1: getting in a Dallas, Texas resident to refute some of
Speaker 1: this this slander. Sure my my, my flawless hometown. Uh
Speaker 1: briefly host to Bernie Sanders when he had to take
Speaker 1: care of something. I've spent a few summers in Dallas.
Speaker 1: I've I've been around it. Unfortunate, I've been around the
Speaker 1: DFW area. I wouldn't recommend spending summers in Dallas. Hold on,
Speaker 1: hold on, I wouldn't recommend spending winters in Dallas either.
Speaker 1: There's a couple of weeks in spring that it's tolerable
Speaker 1: to be in Dallas. Try to make it. Then it
Speaker 1: occurs to me that we should ask Garcy, where were
Speaker 1: you when they killed JFK? Are you was? I'm Garrison?
Speaker 1: I was. I was born in the twenty first century.
Speaker 1: What have you ever a man liquor carcano rifle in
Speaker 1: the back of American Rifleman magazine. Okay, let's let's open
Speaker 1: by by first briefly talking about the thirty one Dorky
Speaker 1: asked neo Nazis who got arrest in Idaho? We're playing
Speaker 1: and you want to talk about it? That's right, That
Speaker 1: is exactly why we've already done the episode. But I'm
Speaker 1: always down to talk about this. I know we just
Speaker 1: did an episode talking about it, but I wasn't on
Speaker 1: that one. So I have a few paragraphs on how
Speaker 1: it relates to today's topic of Christian fascist violence. I
Speaker 1: just want to state that you and I were both
Speaker 1: hanging out at a party when we got the news
Speaker 1: about that, and it is the hardest I've ever seen
Speaker 1: you laugh for like four hours. So hey, like Patriot
Speaker 1: Fronts based on a Texas so that that there is
Speaker 1: a degree of relevance here, yes to the bulk of
Speaker 1: our of our topic today. So yeah, I think it's
Speaker 1: pretty funny because the group fashions all dressed in the
Speaker 1: same outfit. It's almost incomprehensibly fun trade and sauna, so
Speaker 1: they wouldn't pass out well, crammed into a hot, sweaty
Speaker 1: U haul truck driving from all around the country to
Speaker 1: cord relate the Idaho so that they can march around
Speaker 1: with flags and shields to yell at gay and transcits,
Speaker 1: and you know what they did. Instead, They got filled
Speaker 1: over in stetain a ditch while getting their little clad
Speaker 1: hood masks taken off, and spent the rest of a
Speaker 1: day to Idaho jail. And I'll go talxt it's really funny,
Speaker 1: especially since again their best case scenario was spending a
Speaker 1: day free in quarterlin, Ida. I know. And it's so yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll be like, you can be against cops in the
Speaker 1: carstral system while still recognizing how innately a certain and
Speaker 1: hilarious supermarious like it's it's fine when cops in groups
Speaker 1: like Patriot Front beef that's generally a win win for me.
Speaker 1: I'm not cheering on police tactics, it's just it's just
Speaker 1: recognizing that one of my enemies temporarily making another of
Speaker 1: my enemies. Life's harder is pretty funny, It's really funny.
Speaker 1: It's it's the same reason that we don't condemn police
Speaker 1: violence when a cop shoots another cop like exactly like,
Speaker 1: likes and like. Based on these charges, I doubt any
Speaker 1: of these guys, in particular, we'll go to prison for
Speaker 1: long enough to form like any like dangerous connections with
Speaker 1: other InCAR straton people. Well, I'm sure there's a couple
Speaker 1: of dudes in there that, if you know, they were
Speaker 1: to go to a serious prison, could make meaningful inroads
Speaker 1: with the Nazis there. But man, most of those dudes
Speaker 1: Area Nations guys are just kind of like they're not
Speaker 1: going to consider comrades like the the Yeah, it's yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I think the Patriot Front Idaho situation seems
Speaker 1: like it will know to just been inconvenience and national
Speaker 1: embarrassment for them, And I think and I think we
Speaker 1: can we can let this one just be as funny
Speaker 1: as it is, considering there was thirty less Nazis there
Speaker 1: to intimidate and attack people at pride Um and Patriot
Speaker 1: Front maybe now less willing to pull stunts like this
Speaker 1: in the future. Yeah, I've thought about this a lot,
Speaker 1: and I just can't see anyways in which what has
Speaker 1: happened could really be a problem. Um. It seems to
Speaker 1: just purely be funny, so just enjoy it. Yeah. Look,
Speaker 1: look this, this is what happens when you appropriate lesbian culture.
Speaker 1: You get arrested. Actually, it's not all that different from
Speaker 1: what Garrison was saying immediately after the arrest. That is true.
Speaker 1: I made a lot of jokes about how Patriot Front
Speaker 1: looks pretty pretty gay while getting handcuffed. Get the shine
Speaker 1: the cancel radar, get the cancelometer out. We're canceling Garrison. Um. Anyway,
Speaker 1: let's let's continue with this episode. So here is some
Speaker 1: other fun facts about about the whole Idaho thing. So,
Speaker 1: two of the Patriot Front members who were crammed into
Speaker 1: that U haul last weekend, we're connected to a church
Speaker 1: helmed by former Washington state Representative Matt Shay, who is
Speaker 1: also associated with the Bundees, the Oath Keepers, and leads
Speaker 1: the church at Planned Parenthood. Uh. He has advocated like
Speaker 1: civil war if abortion and same sex marriage aren't stopped,
Speaker 1: to kill all the men in left wing cities, all
Speaker 1: that good stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And he was also
Speaker 1: present at the protesting cort alane at the Pride event
Speaker 1: this past weekend, and we can we can draw like
Speaker 1: this direct line from the surge of groomer and anti
Speaker 1: drag propaganda to neo Nazis deciding to organize and travel
Speaker 1: across straight lines to threaten people in a Pride event.
Speaker 1: In the days leading up to the event, Chaia right Check,
Speaker 1: the woman behind the Limbs of TikTok account, repeatedly highlighted
Speaker 1: it weaponizing pearl clutching Satanic panic. In right Check's first
Speaker 1: post about the Pride event, it was about how the
Speaker 1: Satanic Temple was promoting the event. In an Adelaide tweet
Speaker 1: by someone claiming to represent local Satanists on June seven,
Speaker 1: Lives of TikTok posted quote family friendly drag dance party
Speaker 1: being promoted by the Satanic Temple in Idaho. We are
Speaker 1: living in hell, which is a nice and I stop
Speaker 1: un there that. I can't quite tell if that was
Speaker 1: intentional or unintentional about Satanic Temple and living in hell. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I thought that was funny. Um Dave Riley, a white
Speaker 1: supremacist who attended the deadly Unite the Right rally and Charlottesville,
Speaker 1: who also organized with the Identity Europa a few years back.
Speaker 1: He actively solicited libs of TikTok to draw attention to
Speaker 1: the Pride event and sought her help in trying to
Speaker 1: like get publicity for the protests against it, Quoting the
Speaker 1: SPLC hate watch quote, the Idaho Tribune also due attention
Speaker 1: to it, Idaho Tribune far from a real newspaper, is
Speaker 1: to obscure junkan news publication that on multiple occasions has
Speaker 1: promoted Riley's political activism. Anti racist activists also tipped hate
Speaker 1: watch off to infrastructural overlap between a website that promotes
Speaker 1: Riley by name and Idaho Tribune. Hey Watch reviewed the
Speaker 1: source code for Dave Riley's website and the Idaho Tribune
Speaker 1: site and confirmed that the two sites share graphics from
Speaker 1: the same web hosting account, meaning that they are likely
Speaker 1: controlled by the same person unquote. And then on June nine,
Speaker 1: Lips of TikTok posted screenshots taken from the Idaho Tribune
Speaker 1: about the Satanic temple and the quarterly and Pride event,
Speaker 1: boosting content from that white supremacist linked to website to
Speaker 1: her one point two million followers. Every single one of
Speaker 1: these figures using fascist rhetoric at utilizing stochastic methods including
Speaker 1: Chia wit check, her financial backer Seth Dylan, and people
Speaker 1: like Tucker Carlson are all responsible for inciting events like this.
Speaker 1: Tucker led his show last week by using a Nazi
Speaker 1: reference when referring to a Pride event in Dallas in
Speaker 1: terms of stuff that's like outside of you know, conservative
Speaker 1: states like idahoor Texas. Uh. Late last month, right check
Speaker 1: as lips of TikTok targeted a Bay Area drag Queen
Speaker 1: storytime event, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's
Speaker 1: drag queen's reading children's books to kids in a public library.
Speaker 1: And then on June twelve, it was stormed by a
Speaker 1: group of around ten men dressed in proud boy attire
Speaker 1: and shirts that read kill your local pedophile. They threatened
Speaker 1: attendees while shouting homophobic and transphobic slurs, terrifying a bunch
Speaker 1: of kids who had come to hear queens read stories.
Speaker 1: So how did this kind of stuff and like how
Speaker 1: did this rhetoric spread so quickly? Like how did this
Speaker 1: groomer stuff get so volatile so quickly just in these
Speaker 1: just in these past few months, in our war on
Speaker 1: Transpeople episodes and my Operation Privateful episodes, we discussed the
Speaker 1: history of this sort of like save the Children and
Speaker 1: like pedophile rhetoric. Uh. And in my City of Hate
Speaker 1: episode earlier this week, we talked about how this wave
Speaker 1: of homophobia was able to write off the conspiracism of
Speaker 1: Pizza Gate and Q and on and then in this episode,
Speaker 1: we're an attack of out to the types of places
Speaker 1: that this extreme bigotry was able to fester this past
Speaker 1: decade and how it relates to Evangelical Christianity and Christian fascism.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna play an audio clip from a city council
Speaker 1: meeting in Arlington, Texas that happened on May twenty five.
Speaker 1: Take a listen. My name is Jonathan Joey. I'm the
Speaker 1: pastor has been as Badness Church, and I'm here today
Speaker 1: because I have church members that live in Arlington. I
Speaker 1: live only a few miles away from here. Enity business
Speaker 1: in Arlington on a weekly basis. I'm horrified, ashamed that
Speaker 1: the city has assigned to promote and solicit pride in
Speaker 1: this city. Pride is nothing to be celebrated. In fact,
Speaker 1: it's an abomination. The Bible says in Proverbs chapter eight,
Speaker 1: the fear of the Lord is to hate pride, hate evil,
Speaker 1: pride and mrogancy and the evil way and the throw
Speaker 1: word mouth do I hate? According to God, we should
Speaker 1: hate pride, not celebrate it. We should humble ourselves as
Speaker 1: for actually the whole rooms that we were a nation
Speaker 1: under God according to the American flag, and we were
Speaker 1: a state under God if we're in the Texas flag.
Speaker 1: We should humble ourselves to what the Bible says and
Speaker 1: not what the small minority here that doesn't bully would say.
Speaker 1: In June of Mayor Jeff Williams officially announced the steps
Speaker 1: a Pride month in June for the city of Arleyington.
Speaker 1: But I don't understand why we celebrate what used to
Speaker 1: be a crime not long ago. The fact, I'm recording
Speaker 1: to the Texas Penal Coach and Sexual respectful homosexual Conduct
Speaker 1: that Curson commits an offense to be engaged in deviate
Speaker 1: sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex. In fact,
Speaker 1: that is still on the books today, even though Lawrence
Speaker 1: versus Texas overruled that in two thousand three. But God
Speaker 1: has already ruled that murder adults three witch graft rate,
Speaker 1: beastiality of homosexualities are crimes worthy of capital. Arlington, just
Speaker 1: for context, is one of many towns in North Dallas
Speaker 1: that if you happen to have weeed on you, you're
Speaker 1: gonna want to tape it to the bottom of your
Speaker 1: balls before driving through Arlington. Thanks for that great, great
Speaker 1: weed tip from You're Welcome, You're Welcome Garrison. So that
Speaker 1: is Pastor Jonathan Shelley, who lives in Grand Prairie. UM.
Speaker 1: He was there at at an Arlington, Texas City Council
Speaker 1: meeting casually advocating killing gay people while citing Texas is
Speaker 1: laws against homosexuality. Their church, and this connected branch of
Speaker 1: Baptists that will learn more about later, have an intense
Speaker 1: record of preaching genocide against gay and transpeople and also
Speaker 1: a fair amount of anti Semitism. Big big shocker there.
Speaker 1: The previous pastor at this church, which is called Steadfast
Speaker 1: Baptist Church. UM. But the previous pastor who resigned in
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen due to allegations that he paid for sex workers,
Speaker 1: was involved in gambling, and had smoked marijuana. I guess
Speaker 1: he should have aped more of it to his pulse. UM.
Speaker 1: He Garter a national attention for celebrating the Orlando Pulse
Speaker 1: gay nightclub massacre, which killed people. From the pulpit, the
Speaker 1: pastor said that God should finish the job and referred
Speaker 1: to the murdered patrons as sodomites, perverts, and pedophiles. The
Speaker 1: new pastor, John Shelley, continues this same strain of preaching
Speaker 1: violence against gay people. Uh. This next clip is from
Speaker 1: June one, right after someone died after getting hit by
Speaker 1: a truck at a Pride parade in Florida, which we
Speaker 1: later found out was a complete accident. But I don't
Speaker 1: don't think the public knew that at the time. No,
Speaker 1: and obviously people, I mean, I think all of our
Speaker 1: assumptions was, oh, god, you know this is the thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Well here's the clip. If it's going beyond just saying
Speaker 1: you do all this week and stuff, it's saying you
Speaker 1: enjoy it. You enjoy murder, you enjoy malignity, you enjoy
Speaker 1: hating God. Look, there's only one group that enjoys that.
Speaker 1: It is the Pride paradees going up down the street.
Speaker 1: And you know it's great when trucks accidentally go through those,
Speaker 1: you know, parades. I think only one person died, so
Speaker 1: hopefully we can hope for more in the future. You say, well,
Speaker 1: that's me. Yeah, but the Bible says that they're worthy
Speaker 1: of death. You say, are you sad when fags die? No,
Speaker 1: I think it's great. I hope they all die. I
Speaker 1: would love it if every fag would die right now.
Speaker 1: And you say, well, I don't think that's what you
Speaker 1: really mean. That's exactly what I mean. I really mean it.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's it's a poor drummer. Like that's June,
Speaker 1: even a year before the big wave of groomer stuff
Speaker 1: got pushed this past spring with the help of Lives
Speaker 1: of TikTok, and that kind of shows how susceptible modern
Speaker 1: conservatism was to this resurgence of in your face homophobia.
Speaker 1: There's been people to working to like keep it here
Speaker 1: the whole time, just bubbling beneath the surface, and now
Speaker 1: it's just completely boiled over. And I'm gonna say, like,
Speaker 1: the rest of the episode is going to get into
Speaker 1: some pretty dark stuff. We're there's gonna be a few
Speaker 1: more clips that are pretty are pretty gross if you
Speaker 1: want to, if you want to check out, that's totally fine.
Speaker 1: After this episode, I myself. I'm going to take a
Speaker 1: little bit of a break from covering this sort of
Speaker 1: thing that's taking a little bit too much of a
Speaker 1: mental toll, because it's a lot of jenocide. It's it is,
Speaker 1: it's it is. It's pretty intense. Uh. If you do
Speaker 1: feel the need to leave before you go, just remember
Speaker 1: this simple phrase for keeping safe in the DFW area.
Speaker 1: Tape it to your balls and your happiness won't be smalls.
Speaker 1: So here's another clip from June of Shelley reiterating his
Speaker 1: call for the government to execute gay people after he
Speaker 1: received some public backlash for his the previous clip that
Speaker 1: we that we used. And I personally believe that all
Speaker 1: of these sodomites, you know, people that are men with
Speaker 1: men are pedophile because that means that they just simply
Speaker 1: are acted to children. They're attracted to. Uh, these people
Speaker 1: that are the ages of seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, even though
Speaker 1: they're grown adult, they're going after children and very young
Speaker 1: children often cases, and lesting them and hurting them. And
Speaker 1: you know, anybody that loves children, loves their family, would
Speaker 1: want this person to be executed through the proper channels.
Speaker 1: That's what I believe. That's what I teach. I'm not
Speaker 1: a violent person. So my, my, my, my kind of
Speaker 1: fear is that Shelley or someone like you know, John
Speaker 1: Doyle that we talked about in our last City of
Speaker 1: Hit episode. Is not that they themselves will bring a
Speaker 1: weapon to some future Pride parade or go on a
Speaker 1: rampage and assault or kill gay people, right. It's that
Speaker 1: one of their followers or one of their fans will,
Speaker 1: And these types of pastors and far right media figures
Speaker 1: are intentionally leading people onto that outcome. Uh to quote Heymtmetta,
Speaker 1: who's been tracking Steadfast for years, quote, Because while Shelley
Speaker 1: is celebrating murder, he's also handing his congregation a metaphorical
Speaker 1: loaded gun. And if somebody eventually uses a literal one
Speaker 1: to follow through on what they believe to be God's orders,
Speaker 1: they know that Shelley will be proud of them, even
Speaker 1: as he tells the world he has absolutely nothing to
Speaker 1: do with it, unquote. So, under the pressure of activists,
Speaker 1: Steadfast actually got evicted from their old building in Hearst,
Speaker 1: Texas this past March for spreading their extreme anti LGBT
Speaker 1: hate and calls for violence, which was in violation of
Speaker 1: the terms of its least, which prohibited violence and threats.
Speaker 1: The church has an active gab page, which kind of
Speaker 1: tells you a little bit about the people running this
Speaker 1: sort of operation. Uh Insteadfast publicly organized and livestreamed their
Speaker 1: sermons on a very active Facebook page, which is no
Speaker 1: longer active for reasons that we will later discuss. And
Speaker 1: then during these past few months, they've relocated their church
Speaker 1: from Hearst to a building that's part of a strip
Speaker 1: mall in Wattaga, Texas. Is at home say it. That's
Speaker 1: That's the thing about any town in Texas is he
Speaker 1: doesn't have It doesn't matter how you pronounce it, because
Speaker 1: they're Texans. Watuga wat what do whatever you want? Anyway,
Speaker 1: they're now a strip mall church, which I think is
Speaker 1: to look for them. I mean that you're okay, I
Speaker 1: will correct you here. You're saying that like it's it's
Speaker 1: funny as opposed to just the way everything is in
Speaker 1: Texas because Texas is a giant strip mall. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: guess though. And while John Shelley is pretty bad, right,
Speaker 1: We've we've heard a lot of bad clips of him
Speaker 1: talking about how gay people are pedophiles and how they
Speaker 1: should all be killed by the government. He's not the
Speaker 1: only guy who's sad Fast preaching violent in genocidal rhetoric.
Speaker 1: Enter Dylan oz formerly based out of Boise, Idaho, now
Speaker 1: preaching at Stedfast Baptist Church in Watuga, Texas. On Sunday,
Speaker 1: June four, Dylan oz Well, preaching from the pulpit, said
Speaker 1: that the quote solution for the homosexual is for the
Speaker 1: government to execute every single gay person. Here's here is
Speaker 1: here of him that what does God say is the
Speaker 1: answer is the solution for the homosexual in two thousand
Speaker 1: twenty two, here in the New Testament, here in the
Speaker 1: Book of Romans, that they are worthy of death. These
Speaker 1: people should be put to death. Every single homosexual in
Speaker 1: our country should be charged with the crime, the abomination
Speaker 1: of homosexuality that they have. They should be convicted in
Speaker 1: a lawful trial. They should be sentenced with death. They
Speaker 1: should be lined up against the wall and shot in
Speaker 1: the back of the head. That's what God teaches. That's
Speaker 1: what the Bible says. You don't like it, you don't
Speaker 1: like God's work, because that is what God says. I
Speaker 1: don't think that the Bible says anything about guns. Actually, um,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's been a while since I read the
Speaker 1: King James version that said fast exclusively uses, so maybe
Speaker 1: it's like a translation thing, but I don't I don't
Speaker 1: remember anything about shooting or bullets or guns and inside
Speaker 1: my Bible. Um. But speaking of translation things, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go on a little theology right here about quote unquote
Speaker 1: lying with man or lying with men, um, and how
Speaker 1: scholars actually believe if you look at the original Biblical texts,
Speaker 1: not the crap like the King James version and the
Speaker 1: nonsense based off that horrible translation, but the chapters where
Speaker 1: people pull stuff supposedly condemning men for laying with men,
Speaker 1: and quote unquote homosexuality, which is obviously like a very
Speaker 1: modern word, does not belong in a text as oldest
Speaker 1: the Bible, like that just wor didn't that wor didn't
Speaker 1: exist yet. Um. But those passages would probably more accurately
Speaker 1: translate to condemning adult men who rape young boys. Uh.
Speaker 1: And even if they didn't, even if it was about
Speaker 1: adult men with other adult men. I don't fucking care,
Speaker 1: and neither should most Christians, because Christians are not following
Speaker 1: all of the laws of Leviticus, nor should they, like
Speaker 1: that ship was for Israelites thousands of years ago to
Speaker 1: make their culture distinct from other surrounding nations. Like Christians
Speaker 1: aren't railing against the use of mixed fabric for Christ's sake,
Speaker 1: I am, there's there's a lot of there's a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff. Believe in eating shrimp. But I think if
Speaker 1: you use mixed fabrics, you should be executed. You should
Speaker 1: be the back of the head. That's the mainly thing
Speaker 1: that anyone using mixed fabrics death penalty instantly. Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: like obviously there's not these churches preaching against mixed fabric.
Speaker 1: Here's here's Christian preacher Dylanas again justifying his calls for
Speaker 1: the execution of gay people by falsely claiming, obviously that
Speaker 1: all homosexuals are pedophiles. Here's the thing, here's why reprobates,
Speaker 1: Here's why homosexuals are so dangerous to society. They're not
Speaker 1: like other sinners in the sense that every single day
Speaker 1: that they are alive, they're being filled with more and
Speaker 1: more and more unrighteousness. That is a scary thing. You
Speaker 1: want to know why we say that all homosexuals are pedophiles,
Speaker 1: And let me make that very clear. All homosexuals are pedophiles,
Speaker 1: And people say, well, what about all the straight people
Speaker 1: that molest children? There faces, I don't care what you
Speaker 1: call them. If if a person is with a child,
Speaker 1: your factor, you're reprobated, your sodomite. I don't care what
Speaker 1: kind of classifications our government wants to give them. All
Speaker 1: homosexuals are pedophiles. Now here's the thing. Here's here's what
Speaker 1: I'm not saying. I'm not saying that every single homosexual
Speaker 1: that's alive right now has committed that act with a
Speaker 1: child already, because there it could be that they haven't
Speaker 1: had the opportunity yet, and they will at some point
Speaker 1: later in their life. This is why we need to
Speaker 1: put these people to death through the proper channels of
Speaker 1: the government, because the Bible says that they are being filled.
Speaker 1: So here's the thing. Yes, maybe not every single homosexual
Speaker 1: has been with a child yet, But what about tomorrow
Speaker 1: when they're filled with a little more unrighteousness. What about
Speaker 1: in a week from now, when they're a little filled
Speaker 1: with a little more unrighteousness? What about twenty years from now?
Speaker 1: What are they going to be like? You look up
Speaker 1: the statistics on the sodomites that abused children, there with
Speaker 1: so many children will make you throw up disgusting. These
Speaker 1: people are not normal. They're not your average everyday centers.
Speaker 1: They're what the Bible calls reverbates. They're rejected by God.
Speaker 1: They have no hope of salvation. So in John Shelley
Speaker 1: with Steadfast Baptist Church, with the help of a network
Speaker 1: of aggressively homophobic churches, made a two hour quote unquote
Speaker 1: documentary about how to quote protect your children called and
Speaker 1: it's the title is called the Sodabite Deception. See all right, look,
Speaker 1: we're going to look if we're going to do this
Speaker 1: thing where there's licenses for people to buy guns, can
Speaker 1: we have there be a license to make a documentary?
Speaker 1: Can we marry that too? So the quote unquote Sadamite
Speaker 1: Deception aims to expose how the LGBTQ community is contributing
Speaker 1: to the collapse of modern society, which I mean based um.
Speaker 1: The trailer opens with a real banger. Most Americans are
Speaker 1: repelled by the mere notion of homosexuality. The CBS News
Speaker 1: survey shows that two out of three Americans look upon
Speaker 1: homosexuals we've discussed discomfort or fear. One out of ten
Speaker 1: says Hatred. The documentary celebrates historical laws that criminalized homosexuality
Speaker 1: and criticizes more recent laws that expand lgbt Q rights.
Speaker 1: In the film, Shell, he advocates for the death penalty
Speaker 1: to be used on the LGBTQ community and uses, you know,
Speaker 1: many many slurs across this whole thing, all of all
Speaker 1: of them use all kinds of slurs, as I'm sure
Speaker 1: we've heard this past episode. Uh. The pastors of other
Speaker 1: churches part of the New Independent Fundamental Baptist movement, also
Speaker 1: featured in the documentary. Here's a collection of said pastors
Speaker 1: screaming in the trailer for the Sodamite Deception. Thank you,
Speaker 1: Gary Prison, thank you for playing us a trailer of
Speaker 1: people screaming. That's gonna be fun. Starting off with Shelley saying, quote,
Speaker 1: why aren't all these Baptists standing up and saying these
Speaker 1: freaks should go back to hell, should go back in
Speaker 1: the closet, put a bullet in your head. Why aren't
Speaker 1: they saying it? Because some of some of what he
Speaker 1: says his heart to hear. So I'm just saying that
Speaker 1: for you guys, so you know what he's saying. Anyway,
Speaker 1: here's some here's some of the trailer. It's pretty funny.
Speaker 1: Why are all these Baptists standing up and saying, these
Speaker 1: freaks and go back to hell, go back to the closet,
Speaker 1: put a bull in your hat. Why aren't they saying it?
Speaker 1: I'm called bagging, a bagging, a trance bestie, a disgusting gone.
Speaker 1: No homos will ever be allowed on this turk as
Speaker 1: long as I'm the pastor here. Never the law of
Speaker 1: the Lord perfect or is it not? It's perfect? And
Speaker 1: what did he say? Put them to death? You know,
Speaker 1: people say like, well, aren't you sadt that you saw side?
Speaker 1: Here's the problem with that. It's like the equivalent of
Speaker 1: asking me, you know, have you asked me, Hey, are
Speaker 1: you sad that fifty pedophiles were killed today? Um? No,
Speaker 1: I think that's great. I think that helps society. You know,
Speaker 1: I think Orlando, Florida was a little safer tonight now
Speaker 1: that fifty. You know, the tragedy is that more of
Speaker 1: them than Doe? I mean, the tragedy is I'm i'm
Speaker 1: I'm I'm I'm kind I'm upset that he finished the
Speaker 1: job because these people are creditive. So yeah, that sucks. Uh,
Speaker 1: but man, there is just a lot of a lot
Speaker 1: of like men in their forties screaming about gay people.
Speaker 1: They they they seem really concerned. Yes yeah, um. Someone
Speaker 1: in that clip is noted homophobe and the Holocaust denier
Speaker 1: Stephen Anderson, who of of of Faithful Word Baptist Church.
Speaker 1: He's he's the guy shrieking never never anyway. Uh. Steadfast
Speaker 1: Church members and pastors have continued to show up at
Speaker 1: city council meetings in multi cities throughout the Dallas Fort
Speaker 1: Worth area. This past Monday, people associated with the church,
Speaker 1: as well as residents opposing Steadfests bigotry, spoke at a
Speaker 1: city council meeting in Watouga, Texas. I'm here today to
Speaker 1: let the council know of the hate group that hasn'tered
Speaker 1: their city. This hay group was called Steadfast Baptist Church.
Speaker 1: It was in June one that I first came across
Speaker 1: the offensive defamation against women and the LGBTQ community. The
Speaker 1: hate statements, videos and social media posts prompted me to
Speaker 1: join the protests that started in hers and now has
Speaker 1: moved to your city. And I apologize for this, but
Speaker 1: this is quoting him. They are all dirty discased disgusting
Speaker 1: skank cores. In another video, he also states that women
Speaker 1: in positions of leadership and authority are actually a curse
Speaker 1: upon our nation. Council members, at the very least, you
Speaker 1: should encourage the strip law owner Cider Property of Dallas
Speaker 1: to revoke this church's lease. So yeah, there was there
Speaker 1: was kind of like this back and forth at this
Speaker 1: city council meeting. Multiple multiple people from Steadfast responded by
Speaker 1: screaming into the mic and continuing to advocate the execution
Speaker 1: of gay people. One guy that I'll that'll quickly play
Speaker 1: a clip of as Philip millstread of of Steadfast. He
Speaker 1: went further and made a veiled threat of violence the
Speaker 1: city of Otaga. And if police officers are allowing this community,
Speaker 1: the son of my community, to intimidate church members from
Speaker 1: worshiping God the way he should be worshiped and truth,
Speaker 1: and if you don't do something, something will happen bad.
Speaker 1: So that's fun. Um. It's also a strong, strong definition
Speaker 1: of the word veiled. Well, I mean like in terms
Speaker 1: like obviously they're they're they're talking about execution and genocide.
Speaker 1: He's talking about like actually doing physical like like actually
Speaker 1: like as vigilante is doing physical violence, which is different
Speaker 1: because Steadfast usually tries to frame their violence within like
Speaker 1: it's okay because it's a part of the government. Right.
Speaker 1: Uh So when they're like talking about just doing like
Speaker 1: vigilantism or list saying like we're gonna take this into
Speaker 1: our own hands, right, it's it's it's it's a little
Speaker 1: bit different. Wattuga Mayor Arthur Minor this past Tuesday, so
Speaker 1: that he is discussing the status of Steadfast Baptist Church
Speaker 1: with the city attorney, while also stating that the attorney
Speaker 1: has told him that it's a First Amendment issue, so
Speaker 1: that there's quote nothing that the city can do at
Speaker 1: this time, but we are looking at other avenues unquote,
Speaker 1: and I mean that's to be that's probably probably fair.
Speaker 1: It's hard to make a church leave a place. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So he did not he did not elaborate further than that,
Speaker 1: but he did encourage people to bring up the issue
Speaker 1: with the person holding Steadfast's lease at this strip mall
Speaker 1: in Watuca. Uh let his let us go on another
Speaker 1: ad break. Do you know who won't shriek at gay
Speaker 1: people and call on the government to kill them? Hope,
Speaker 1: hopefully these these these ads, hopefully not for another couple
Speaker 1: of years. Yeah, well that's why I said hopefully. Okay,
Speaker 1: so let's let's talk a bit more about this, this
Speaker 1: church's ideology and this network that it's associated with, because
Speaker 1: it is actually kind of interesting. So Steadfast Baptist Church
Speaker 1: is part of Steven Anderson's church network called the New
Speaker 1: Independent fundamental Baptist Movement, uh, which I'm just gonna call
Speaker 1: the New i FB because those are way too many words. Um.
Speaker 1: And they claim it's not like a denomination, but rather
Speaker 1: a revival of what the old Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Movement
Speaker 1: once arepresented unquote. The New I f B churches just
Speaker 1: like the old if the churches used the King James
Speaker 1: Bible exclusively. And the Old Life b movement was founded
Speaker 1: in the forties and was trying to reclaim the fundamentalism
Speaker 1: of the nineteen twenties. And so we're just we're going
Speaker 1: back from the two thousand twenties to that I twenties, uh,
Speaker 1: in terms of their social views times of flat circle. Uh,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna quote a little bit from the A. D.
Speaker 1: L which of course is very hit and miss as
Speaker 1: an organization. But they didn't, but they did, they did.
Speaker 1: They do have any They do have a decent article
Speaker 1: on the new U I f B churches because this
Speaker 1: is like specifically the thing they focus on is this
Speaker 1: sort of anti Semitism. So anyway, quote, the New I
Speaker 1: f B ideology promotes the anti Semitic notion that Jews
Speaker 1: today are impostors who are not the true Jews described
Speaker 1: in the Bible, which by the way, is awfully close
Speaker 1: to Christian identity. I mean that is essentially Christian identity.
Speaker 1: It is. It's very very similar. I think the New
Speaker 1: I f B stuff is slightly different. It comes out
Speaker 1: from a slightly different direction, it's like, but they reach
Speaker 1: a very similar conclusion. Like I don't think they believe
Speaker 1: that Christians are like the true Jews, and they don't
Speaker 1: talk about like Arians and stuff, and they're not doing
Speaker 1: British Israelism, but they Judaism is the Synagogue of Saying.
Speaker 1: But it's like, well, some of them do use the
Speaker 1: term the Synagogue of Satan, but like you know, they
Speaker 1: hate Judaism because as a religion, it's made up of
Speaker 1: Jews who do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah. So
Speaker 1: therefore they are not truly descendants of Israel. Right, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's they come at it from more of that direction,
Speaker 1: but it is still extremely close to Christian identity. Like
Speaker 1: it is, it is. It is just a tiny hop
Speaker 1: of a pond like the kiss for sure. No, they
Speaker 1: like they are so they are absolutely in the same
Speaker 1: networks because they are preaching very similar ideology um back
Speaker 1: to the back, back to the Idel quote. They often
Speaker 1: claim that Jews today worship Satan and that the Star
Speaker 1: of David represents the devil. The new i FB doctrine
Speaker 1: promotes the notion of an Antichrist, whom they claim will
Speaker 1: be Jewish. In their sermons very new various New i
Speaker 1: FB pastors often openly state that they hate Judaism as religion,
Speaker 1: and in addition to criticizing Judaism, many New i FB
Speaker 1: pastors also promote andy Semitic tropes about Jewish power and
Speaker 1: control over sectors like finance, news, media, and journalism. New
Speaker 1: i FB pastors have also promoted Holocaust denial. In pastor
Speaker 1: Stephen Anderson presented a number of false claims in a
Speaker 1: video specifically addressing the so called quote Holocaust hoax unquote
Speaker 1: saying the numbers don't add up, the facts don't add up.
Speaker 1: Um Anderson alleged that quote some Jews were among the
Speaker 1: many quote casualties on both sides matter, but he blamed
Speaker 1: those deaths on starvation and poor conditions, claiming that quote
Speaker 1: just because people were rounded up and putting for slabor
Speaker 1: camps does not mean that they were systematically exterminated or
Speaker 1: cremated to the tune of six million unquote. Unlike many
Speaker 1: in the evangelical movement, New I f B Churches are
Speaker 1: staunchly anti Zionist and anti Israel data christ Zionism as
Speaker 1: quote jew worship unquote, and view the traditional support for
Speaker 1: Israel among Evangelical Christians as a result of Jewish deception
Speaker 1: in support of the anti christ. But they have a
Speaker 1: ton of opinions about the sinking of the U. S S.
Speaker 1: Liberty in line with their broader anti Simmitic use Judaism
Speaker 1: as a false and evil religion. The modern nation of
Speaker 1: Israel is regularly characterized as wicked and a fraud unquote.
Speaker 1: And they do not dislike Israel because Israel commits genocide
Speaker 1: against Palestinian people, because, as you say that, they're very
Speaker 1: pro genocide as a concept. Yeah, and then to be honest,
Speaker 1: probably pretty pro genocide of the Palestinian people. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: just not that way. Yeah. So that's a little a
Speaker 1: little right up on what this network of churches believes.
Speaker 1: Like everyone you heard talk talk inside the Sodomite Deception
Speaker 1: trailer is part of this network of churches. Um, they're
Speaker 1: all across the South, some of them, and some summer
Speaker 1: in like California, Arizona, Idaho, oh, Oklahoma, Texas, you know,
Speaker 1: lots of other Southern states. And if you want to
Speaker 1: carry out a sodomite deception, tape your drugs to your
Speaker 1: junk when you drive through Texas. So thankfully, churches like
Speaker 1: these are not standing unopposed. Specifically in the Dallas Fort
Speaker 1: Worth area, there has been a number of protests at
Speaker 1: the church's old location, which resulted in them getting evicted,
Speaker 1: and protests at their new location. I'm gonna place some
Speaker 1: audio from from protests that have taken taken place over
Speaker 1: the course of the past few weeks. We're here to
Speaker 1: protest that has Baptist churches to the registered hate group
Speaker 1: here in Texas on spl center dot org. We protested
Speaker 1: them and harst for non months. We found them here
Speaker 1: and so we are back every Wednesday and every Sunday.
Speaker 1: I am a mom of a kid from the LGBTQ community,
Speaker 1: and I am not going to stand for you wishing
Speaker 1: death upon my kid just because of who he is
Speaker 1: and who knows. It's extremely exhausting, um, but at the
Speaker 1: same time, it's very reassuring because we get nothing but
Speaker 1: support from the people on the street to drive by
Speaker 1: and give us plenty of hans and wives and it's
Speaker 1: just so much love and support from the people that
Speaker 1: live in the community here as well as first that's
Speaker 1: my city, so it's very personal. And I've noticed that
Speaker 1: we've gotten a lot of new people come out here
Speaker 1: because this is their sit and it's personal for death.
Speaker 1: So that's that's pretty good to hear that there's actually
Speaker 1: people standing up to to say, hey, these guys suck.
Speaker 1: In person. Uh, there probably should be more people going
Speaker 1: in person because once you like, the church is obviously
Speaker 1: facing a lot of a lot of confrontations like online
Speaker 1: and stuff. Right, they're facing a lot of online pushback,
Speaker 1: but once you bring it into the real world, it
Speaker 1: definitely it's a only different thing in terms of how
Speaker 1: how they're being viewed. I mean in some ways, you know,
Speaker 1: they enjoy being persecuted, right, they enjoy the notion of
Speaker 1: Christian persecution. But also it's great to have, you know,
Speaker 1: people waving Pride flags outside their little church every Sunday. Um.
Speaker 1: The church still has an active Instagram page um, and
Speaker 1: still has a Twitter account, but their actual tweets do
Speaker 1: keep getting taken down for hate speech. UM. A week ago,
Speaker 1: YouTube striked Steadfast's main channel where they post videos and sermons.
Speaker 1: As they weren't able to use their main channel on Facebook,
Speaker 1: they began promoting their second YouTube channel as a platform
Speaker 1: to stream their murderous anti gay hate sermons during Pride Month,
Speaker 1: and a few days after I posted about that on Twitter,
Speaker 1: their secondary YouTube got completely banned, and then after a
Speaker 1: few days their Facebook page was also taken down. So
Speaker 1: they are they do have, They do have a shrinking
Speaker 1: online presence. There's this other clip from the Sodomite Deception
Speaker 1: trailer that I think really gives you a peek into
Speaker 1: the minds of these folks who are pushing this sort
Speaker 1: of stuff. Um. And you can even see this the
Speaker 1: same sentiment, uh in the rise of white nationalism and
Speaker 1: West premacy, this past a decade. And my question is
Speaker 1: why are we embracing all this change as person to
Speaker 1: the Bible change. The Bible radically changed ten years ago,
Speaker 1: my King James. Bible hasn't changed the work since it
Speaker 1: was translated in sixteen eleven period, So why in the
Speaker 1: world is everything changing. It's not from God, that's for sure.
Speaker 1: You know what's coming from the working of Satan. He's
Speaker 1: deceiving people thinking all all this normal now. So our
Speaker 1: our challenge, as people who are you know, anti fascists,
Speaker 1: people who stand against you know, our anti racist, pushback
Speaker 1: against this type of anti queer um organizing, our Our
Speaker 1: our challenge is to keep the change coming and to
Speaker 1: push back against these freaks trying to hold onto the
Speaker 1: twentieth century right. The fear of change and the fear
Speaker 1: of the future is driving their you know, desire to
Speaker 1: return to the past. The train of like social progress
Speaker 1: was moving forward over the course of the past twenty years,
Speaker 1: and they're scared and they're trying to stop it and
Speaker 1: move it backwards. And it's up to us to make
Speaker 1: that as hard as possible. Um. But yeah, that is
Speaker 1: that is my that is my stuff on on Staidfast church.
Speaker 1: I'm now going to open up, open up the floor
Speaker 1: to anyone. Robert Chris, what do you guys think of
Speaker 1: all of the stuff we just heard about the past
Speaker 1: thirty minutes. One of the keys is you want to
Speaker 1: use tape that has a good level of adhesion but
Speaker 1: isn't going to actually damage your skin. Really, Yeah, like
Speaker 1: scott tape. What are we what are we doing here?
Speaker 1: Scotch tape will do, okay, you really want to avoid
Speaker 1: duct tape, but something like painters tape generally isn't going
Speaker 1: to have the adhesion that you need. Um, it's gonna
Speaker 1: be a little bit unpleasant any time you're taking tape
Speaker 1: off of and I do recommend actually putting it like
Speaker 1: more in the taint area or the inner thigh. You're
Speaker 1: gonna have a better better experience. You might want to
Speaker 1: shave that inner thigh if you're not somebody who does normally,
Speaker 1: just so that you have a better time getting your
Speaker 1: drugs free. But you know, crotch it. That's always been
Speaker 1: my motto. Just crotch it again. Great, great, great, great
Speaker 1: Texas insight coming coming out of Robert Evans here. No,
Speaker 1: I mean, like, okay, so seriously, the fact that there's
Speaker 1: been resistance to these folks in the street. Um, and
Speaker 1: that it's been significant that they've like not just people
Speaker 1: showing up to yell at them and approach them in
Speaker 1: the moment, but people you know, working to get them
Speaker 1: kicked out of their locations and stuff. Um. That's really good. Um.
Speaker 1: And that's that's honestly more the Texas that I have
Speaker 1: known than or at least it's as much of the
Speaker 1: Texas that I've known as like the shitty things that
Speaker 1: this says about Texas. Um. First protest I ever went
Speaker 1: to was against a church like this who you've probably
Speaker 1: out of, the Westboro Baptist Church when they showed up
Speaker 1: to protest at the Holocaust Museum. Uh. Um. And it
Speaker 1: was like like a whole hundreds of people showed up
Speaker 1: to like and there were like six of those fuckers. UM.
Speaker 1: So I mean, the problem with Texas has never been that, Um,
Speaker 1: there aren't a lot of awesome people in Texas. It's
Speaker 1: that folks like this, these who really want to use
Speaker 1: the mechanisms of the state to carry out a genocide,
Speaker 1: have a lot of friends in high places. And many
Speaker 1: of those folks spent decades ensharing that it's basically impossible
Speaker 1: for anybody else to win election outside of like you know,
Speaker 1: local elections and cities and stuff, which often city governments
Speaker 1: in Texas. Again, if you look at a lot of
Speaker 1: the the reaction to Abbot's anti trans bills and where
Speaker 1: will be sort of the the actual resistance is Texas
Speaker 1: is anti gay legislation gets more extreme um is in
Speaker 1: cities like Dallas and Austin and Houston. And it is
Speaker 1: like local laws and local local elected leaders as well
Speaker 1: as local activists who represent an awful lot of Texas
Speaker 1: but and you know, don't have any real power in
Speaker 1: the levers of the state. But do you tend to
Speaker 1: stand up and in a lot of cases like people
Speaker 1: did for some of these these events in Dallas recently
Speaker 1: put their bodies, you know, in between fascists and the
Speaker 1: people they're threatening. And I mean the new I f B.
Speaker 1: Churches are definitely probably a more extreme, more explicit than
Speaker 1: most of your average Christian churches. But it is not
Speaker 1: uncommon to preach this general strain of homophobia. Maybe it
Speaker 1: turned down like one notch of the dial from the
Speaker 1: pulpit in the majority of of of churches, specifically in
Speaker 1: the South. Um, yeah, you don't. We should be lighting
Speaker 1: these people against wall and killing them. But you say that,
Speaker 1: you know this is not biblical. You know we're supposed
Speaker 1: to live in a biblical society. And you say everything,
Speaker 1: but that last like ten or Fife. It's the it is.
Speaker 1: It is not like this strain of homophobia is has
Speaker 1: been there this this entire time. Um, And people of
Speaker 1: I feel like they have permission to say things now
Speaker 1: that they honestly wouldn't probably wouldn't have said as explicitly
Speaker 1: like five years ago. Um. But there was there's always
Speaker 1: been people working to keep this thing within the culture.
Speaker 1: As as stuff was progressing socially, there was people working
Speaker 1: to keep this type of bigotry still alive in large
Speaker 1: sectors of the American public. And a lot of those
Speaker 1: sectors are related to Evangelical Christianity, and a lot of
Speaker 1: those sectors are really related to the communities around church building.
Speaker 1: So that's like a big part and how Christian fascism
Speaker 1: has been so effective the past that you know, like
Speaker 1: that basically the past decades, starting starting with the Tea Party,
Speaker 1: is that they've had people with vested interests like keeping
Speaker 1: this stuff afloat I mean, uh, Lips of TikTok receives
Speaker 1: her funding from Seth Dillon, the guy who runs The
Speaker 1: Babylon B, which started as a Christian satire site. Um
Speaker 1: like now Elon Musk's favorite place on the Internet, which
Speaker 1: is wild, I mean, but but yeah, like like you know,
Speaker 1: like I I remember reading The Babylon B when I
Speaker 1: was like fucking twelve years old, when I was like
Speaker 1: a Christian kid like I. It was just like like
Speaker 1: it used to be just a small, niche Christian site
Speaker 1: and now it grew into this you know, big powerful
Speaker 1: force in a modern conservatism. It is directly funding Lips
Speaker 1: of TikTok, which is basically now just a gun that
Speaker 1: gets pointed at whatever you know, targeted event that that
Speaker 1: they want. So it's now it's like this completely like
Speaker 1: AstroTurf thing with all of this funding and people choosing
Speaker 1: what events to target. So like it all goes back
Speaker 1: to this, It all goes back to these types of
Speaker 1: churches and this type of this type of rhetoric coming
Speaker 1: out of you know, these few misinterpreted Biblical passages. It
Speaker 1: is weird, how Like I mean, when I was you know,
Speaker 1: a teenager, when you talked about like Christian entertainment, Christian comedy,
Speaker 1: Christian music, Christian media. You meant, like the most boring
Speaker 1: milk toast ship and the planet. Like not that there
Speaker 1: wasn't toxic and hateful ship within being preached in churches,
Speaker 1: but like Christian media was, like it was pretty hard
Speaker 1: to be offended and most of it. And now when
Speaker 1: you say that, like you immediately go to like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: somebody's trying to get gay people murdered. Um, Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: something else. Yeah, there's been a large increase in the
Speaker 1: militancy of Christian propaganda and posing you know, stuff that
Speaker 1: used to be just very like very boring milk like
Speaker 1: milk toast and like still very like you know, patriarchal, heteronormative,
Speaker 1: you know, probably low key white supremacist um is not. Yeah,
Speaker 1: now lots of the propaganda is way more focused in
Speaker 1: this type of militant Christianity UM and focused on you know,
Speaker 1: all all of like the end times. Stuff's gotten so
Speaker 1: much more more of a thing um and just how
Speaker 1: it relates to like physical violence against currently living people anyway. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the that's the Steadfast Baptist Church and the Sodomite
Speaker 1: deception Um brought to you by people out of Dallas.
Speaker 1: So yeah, those are my Those are my two episodes.
Speaker 1: I mean we started first episode this week was part one.
Speaker 1: Last episode this week is part two, so they're spread out,
Speaker 1: but those are those are my two two episodes on
Speaker 1: the City of the Homophobia and Christian Fascism inside the
Speaker 1: City of Hate. Look, if you want to help out,
Speaker 1: find the addresses of one of these churches. Now, the
Speaker 1: next thing you're gonna do is you're going to find
Speaker 1: a good Torrent client and you're gonna download a DVD
Speaker 1: rip of Morbius. There's a lot of them out there.
Speaker 1: Then you're gonna burn that. You may need to buy
Speaker 1: a burner. It's a lot of people aren't going to
Speaker 1: have this equipment. But you're gonna burn that onto a DVD.
Speaker 1: You can also put it on a flash drive if
Speaker 1: you really wanted. And then you're just gonna start mailing
Speaker 1: those in mass to the church. If we get them
Speaker 1: enough copies of Morbius, I think we might be able
Speaker 1: to turn them around. Hey, we'll be back Monday with
Speaker 1: more episodes every week from now until the heat death
Speaker 1: of the Universe. It could happen here is a production
Speaker 1: of cool zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
Speaker 1: visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check
Speaker 1: us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can find sources
Speaker 1: for It could happen here, updated monthly at cool zone
Speaker 1: media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.