Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome to akadath Here, a podcast about things falling apart
Speaker 2: and also sometimes about how not to put them back
Speaker 2: together and how to fail to put them back together.
Speaker 2: I am your host, Miya Wong, and today we are
Speaker 2: going to be talking about the place where the anti
Speaker 2: trians crusade began, North Carolina, and about the recent spade
Speaker 2: of anti trans bills that have been passed there. And
Speaker 2: with me to talk about this is David Forbes, an
Speaker 2: editor and journalist with a trans news network and the
Speaker 2: Asheville Blade. David, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 2: So I think some people, if you're listening to this show,
Speaker 2: you may remember that North Carolina is the state that
Speaker 2: passed the first bathroom bills. But what has gotten significantly
Speaker 2: less attention is a everything that happened after that, and
Speaker 2: b a series of two really sweeping and hideous anti
Speaker 2: trans bills that have been passed in the last month
Speaker 2: or so. And David wrote a really really good piece
Speaker 2: for trans News Network about both these bills and also
Speaker 2: how democrats in the state helped pass them. So I
Speaker 2: want to talk about that, and I guess the place
Speaker 2: to start is, can you talk about what these two
Speaker 2: bills HB aight oh five and SB four four to
Speaker 2: two got started.
Speaker 4: Sure, so of the two, HBAH five is the more
Speaker 4: sweeping broadly, at least, they're both terrible anti trans bill.
Speaker 4: It affects everything from changing your birth certificate to state
Speaker 4: health plans not covering trans healthcare to really ominously like
Speaker 4: what jail or prison you get put into if you're
Speaker 4: a trans person and you're arrested. That one, it's kind
Speaker 4: of a laundry list of you know, far right anti
Speaker 4: trans ideas. The other SB four forty two is one
Speaker 4: of those where it takes some digging. And here I'm
Speaker 4: really thankful that TNN's policy analyst, who I think y'all
Speaker 4: have had on herttem's Kareean Green in the show, was
Speaker 4: actually there to yes, was a huge help in reviewing
Speaker 4: this bill. I've been covered with North Carolina politics and
Speaker 4: it's various horrors for a long time. But even still,
Speaker 4: it's good to have like legislative expertise on that. And
Speaker 4: SA four forty two changes the definition of child abuse
Speaker 4: to not include transphobic child abuse. Essentially, it was written
Speaker 4: against the very fictional specter of like, oh, if you
Speaker 4: have questions about this trans stuff and you get your
Speaker 4: kids pronouns wrong, DSS could come like snatch them overnight,
Speaker 4: which is not a thing that has ever happened, no,
Speaker 4: including them, especially North Carolina, Like yeah, yeah, so, but
Speaker 4: what it does is just bluntly open the way, especially
Speaker 4: in the state foster care system, for just anti trans
Speaker 4: bigotry across the board. You know, at this point it's like, okay, well,
Speaker 4: placement can be ni based on someone's religion or their race,
Speaker 4: and being a trans vote, you know, it's like that's
Speaker 4: that's being added those protected identities. It's also essentially letting
Speaker 4: the ground work for just even more legal sanctioning of
Speaker 4: conversion therapy, which is of course torture and abuse. I
Speaker 4: think Cream summed up as that if you if you
Speaker 4: don't have a transkid to abuse, foster care will provide
Speaker 4: one for yeah, which is it's really bleak. Yeah we chuckle,
Speaker 4: but it's we chuckle and like gallows humor because it's
Speaker 4: that absurd. So SB four forty two was the one
Speaker 4: that kind of went through the whole legislative process first,
Speaker 4: and in some ways it had less of a party
Speaker 4: line treatment than HB eighth five eventually did so you know,
Speaker 4: say credit where do But NC Senate Democrats, of whom
Speaker 4: there aren't terribly many, but there are some did universally
Speaker 4: vote against this bill. They were like, no, we're not
Speaker 4: approving it. However, the GOP has a two thirds majority
Speaker 4: in there, so it's really not as necessary. They can
Speaker 4: potentially override a veto. And they're where things really came
Speaker 4: down to as North Caronina House, and they are nine
Speaker 4: Democrats joined with the Republicans to pass this, and then
Speaker 4: it got to the desk of Governor Josh Stein, who
Speaker 4: wanted a landslide last year. Like North Carolina Democrats, despite
Speaker 4: how Jerry mayor of the state is, which we'll talk
Speaker 4: about more in a little bit, actually did pretty well.
Speaker 4: The GOP no longer had a super majority in the House,
Speaker 4: and the Democratic candidate for governor, former Attorney General Josh Stein,
Speaker 4: won in a route.
Speaker 3: So essentially that was supposed to prevent bills.
Speaker 4: Like this from becoming law because, Okay, if the Dems
Speaker 4: held the line in the North Carolina the House, the
Speaker 4: Republicans own the supermajority, then the governor vetos it, then
Speaker 4: they can't override the veto.
Speaker 3: That didn't happen.
Speaker 4: So not only did nine Democrats side with Republicans, Stein
Speaker 4: signed the bill, yeah, which is hideous. Yeah, and it
Speaker 4: was it was bleakly insul the way he did it too,
Speaker 4: because it was just like he didn't even issue a
Speaker 4: statement or oh, like, well we still believe in trans rights.
Speaker 4: This is a bureaucratic thing or even bother to make
Speaker 4: an excuse. It was just tuck in a list of
Speaker 4: bills that he signed that day alongside like some other
Speaker 4: bureaucratic stuff involving like retirement communities and recognizing driver's licenses.
Speaker 4: So it's definitely kind of insult to injury sort of situation. Interestingly,
Speaker 4: North Carolina's gay ink organizations, you're kind of like the
Speaker 4: main line nonprofits and in North kind of there's like
Speaker 4: a quality and see there's a campaignsion the quality, which
Speaker 4: is regional but is based in the state here in Nashville.
Speaker 4: They actually had been very strongly against this bill, despite
Speaker 4: some Democrats supporting it, but they stopped short, as will
Speaker 4: become a theme with condemning.
Speaker 3: Or attacking any of the Democrats who.
Speaker 4: Did, which was a giant signal that this is not
Speaker 4: an issue you're really going to fight Democrats on so
Speaker 4: the governor then thinks, well, there's no political capital be
Speaker 4: lost signing this thing. On the same day, he did
Speaker 4: veto HB eightoh five I, along with a bunch of
Speaker 4: other bills targeting, you know, in quote Mark's dei measures,
Speaker 4: which are basically attempts to smash out anything that's not
Speaker 4: far right and further research shape the state, and he
Speaker 4: did veto those. The language you use, though, was definitely
Speaker 4: what a lot of us become used to. It's the oh,
Speaker 4: this was divisive. No trans people mentioned, no trans healthcare mention,
Speaker 4: no trans rights mentioned, just vaguely, well, this is divisive
Speaker 4: and it's a distraction. So HB EIGHTO five does actually
Speaker 4: go back to the legislature, and one Democrat had voted
Speaker 4: for HBAO five, So there was a tension turning of Okay,
Speaker 4: is this guy gonna still vote for a veto override
Speaker 4: Representative Dante Pittman, because it's a big deal, supposedly anyway,
Speaker 4: for a Democrat to defy their own governor. It's one
Speaker 4: thing when it's like you're just okay, you know the
Speaker 4: bill's going to pass. It's still horrible, but it's supposedly
Speaker 4: a harder bar to reach, or at least that's what
Speaker 4: various you know, instensibly pro Queer Democrats are telling us
Speaker 4: for them to go on the record be like no,
Speaker 4: I'm joining with the other party to own varide your
Speaker 4: veto and like give you the middle finger, essentially. But
Speaker 4: what happened when he got to the House, he actually
Speaker 4: did did vote to hold with the veto. But another
Speaker 4: representative's been out on a pretty dubious excused absence when
Speaker 4: HBOO five was ritually they're Democratic rep Nasif Maajid voted
Speaker 4: in favor.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that was enough to make it law.
Speaker 4: So the one thing that among queer and transing North
Speaker 4: Carolina who liked a lot of their places, voted very
Speaker 4: heavily against the Republicans, you know, for the Democratic candidates
Speaker 4: and all. It's one reason they did fairly well last
Speaker 4: year to stop exactly this sort of legislation becoming law.
Speaker 4: It just became law, and it did so thanks to
Speaker 4: members of the Democratic Party and in one bill, the
Speaker 4: Democratic governor.
Speaker 2: Both of these bills are unbelievably draconian, like these are
Speaker 2: things that even like two years ago, like banning state
Speaker 2: funding for like all trans healthcare.
Speaker 3: Well for the state health plan. We should specify.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, sorry, it is like the state health care
Speaker 2: but co And this is at least my understanding of it,
Speaker 2: is that this is a ban on.
Speaker 4: All ages, yes, for anyone on the state health care plan.
Speaker 4: So if someone is a state employee or a teacher, yeah,
Speaker 4: or like your kids are exactly, and it's kin. Actually
Speaker 4: it's close to home for me because I grew up
Speaker 4: poor in North Carolina and one of the only reasons
Speaker 4: we had health care growing up was my mom, as
Speaker 4: poorly paid as she was, was a public school teacher.
Speaker 4: So you know, it's a trans kid in where I was.
Speaker 4: Now where we know, you know, it's easier for trans
Speaker 4: kids to know who they are. It's not quite as
Speaker 4: a race as it was back in the nineties. Ye
Speaker 4: can't get health care a trains adult who's a teacher
Speaker 4: can't have their health care covered anymore.
Speaker 2: And that's a thing that like two years ago, Ron
Speaker 2: DeSantis wasn't calling for this. No, right, the Daily Wire
Speaker 2: at that point, like two years ago, is explicitly calling
Speaker 2: for trans extorminacious things, but they're not specifically proposing adults
Speaker 2: can't use trans healthcare. That's not a thing like, yeah,
Speaker 2: that was that was even on the table, and now
Speaker 2: you have like you have a Democrat overwriting their own
Speaker 2: governor's veto to get this through.
Speaker 4: Yes, a Democrat in a solidly blue district. Magine's district
Speaker 4: is in the middle of Charlotte, which for folks who
Speaker 4: may I mean it familiar to sit like Charlott's largest
Speaker 4: city here and it is not known for being like
Speaker 4: at least on voting law, as it doesn't go for
Speaker 4: the GOP generally.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then this is the same point that I
Speaker 2: want to make about this bill, like redefining what child
Speaker 2: abuse is like even by the standards of sort of
Speaker 2: like far right anti trans bills, those are really weird
Speaker 2: and radical.
Speaker 4: Korean said it was one of the worst that she'd
Speaker 4: seen in the country as far as like on the
Speaker 4: childcare front.
Speaker 2: From my covering of this too, Yeah, this is one
Speaker 2: of the worst things I've ever seen, and the Democratic
Speaker 2: Party has to.
Speaker 4: It passed with nine Democrats in favor and the governor
Speaker 4: signed it. Yeah, that's unbelievably horrifying.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And the fact that the queer wargs in the state
Speaker 2: were unwilling to condemn the Democrats who passed this is
Speaker 2: just horrifying.
Speaker 4: It is, and actually goes one further than that, because
Speaker 4: afterwards they didn't even bother to put out perfunctory oh,
Speaker 4: we're disappointed, Governor's stein, you know, we will continue to
Speaker 4: try to fight this legislation in court or something like that.
Speaker 4: They did nothing. Yeah, they just they went silent. So
Speaker 4: and you know, their condinations of SB four forty two,
Speaker 4: especially before this bill passed, they were all correct. It
Speaker 4: is horrible. It does sanction child abuse. It is horrific
Speaker 4: on every single front. It is a catastrophe. It is
Speaker 4: draconian all that. It didn't stop being so when Democrats
Speaker 4: started supporting it. Yeah, the kids hurt by this family's
Speaker 4: hurt by this aren't going to be any less hurt
Speaker 4: because a Democrat signed on to it.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And before we go to break the thing I want
Speaker 2: to sort of close this section with is that, like,
Speaker 2: you know, I think it's a very very common thing
Speaker 2: to focus on, like, okay, why are you focusing on
Speaker 2: the Democrats right now when the Republicans are doing all
Speaker 2: of this stuff. And this is a case where very
Speaker 2: explicitly and this is the dynamic I think you've seen
Speaker 2: across the board with for example, like Chuck Schumer like
Speaker 2: helping to get their Republican budget through right. Yes, the
Speaker 2: stuff the Republicans are doing, a lot of it can't
Speaker 2: be implemented without the support of the Democrats, and the
Speaker 2: Democrats have been willing to support the fascist government implementing
Speaker 2: this stuff, and that makes them a collaborationist party. Yes,
Speaker 2: in a lot of extremely important cases. And when that happens.
Speaker 2: In North Carolina is one of the places at the forefront,
Speaker 2: and it has been at the forefront for like a decade,
Speaker 2: for nearly a decade, but yeah, for nearly a decade.
Speaker 2: It's like eight years, seven seven, eight years nine nine.
Speaker 4: As of this year, it's nine years since HB two.
Speaker 4: Good Lord along in the spring of twenty six six.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh that is yeah.
Speaker 2: This is do not do not go to sleep at
Speaker 2: five in the morning and then try to do math
Speaker 2: live on the area. It will come for you too,
Speaker 2: really truly, it was China s attract sixteenth of Okay,
Speaker 2: this is this, this, this, this, this is your one
Speaker 2: moment of levity and a bunch of extremely bleak shit.
Speaker 2: Isn't be trying and failing to do math on air. Look,
Speaker 2: I can drive, that's and I'm sticking to it. But
Speaker 2: what we were seeing here is the way in which
Speaker 2: like resistance to the GUOPN this is a place like
Speaker 2: North Carolina is a state where in the midst of
Speaker 2: a just unbelievable national right wing turn right queer people
Speaker 2: turned out to stop this. Yeah, and their reward for
Speaker 2: their resistance was the people that they had put in
Speaker 2: charge of defending them, and in as staggering of an
Speaker 2: example of the banality of evil as I've ever seen,
Speaker 2: just signed this horrific piece of anti trans legislation that
Speaker 2: couldn't have been passed without them into effect in the
Speaker 2: same thing as like fucking as a bunch of regulatory bullshit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then Gaying did nothing.
Speaker 4: The groups they're supposed to lobby at the football this
Speaker 4: is the point of their existence in nothing. Yeah, at
Speaker 4: that point, they just they let they let it go,
Speaker 4: you know, on the next fundraising cycle, onto the next
Speaker 4: AI meme too on your page to boost you know,
Speaker 4: content generation or whatever.
Speaker 5: And here we are, and we are back.
Speaker 2: Now for the brevity of this show, I am not
Speaker 2: going to go into my giant rant about how this
Speaker 2: is what happened with mid Rand and the French socialists
Speaker 2: and how mid Rand and the Socialist Party instituted neoliberal
Speaker 2: isab in France. But Coma we are instead of instead
Speaker 2: of doing that, or me going on another rant about
Speaker 2: the absorption of social movements the Nies of Bolivia, or
Speaker 2: another rant about the seventeen different iterations of this that
Speaker 2: we've seen over the years. See my episodes on Lula,
Speaker 2: see many many, many, many many things I've done. We're
Speaker 2: going to go back and talk about this in the
Speaker 2: context of North Carolina because I think there's a really
Speaker 2: very a very important thread that David you have been
Speaker 2: pulling on in this piece and in general that is
Speaker 2: really not well understood anywhere. That is about the structure
Speaker 2: and function of the Democratic Party in the South and
Speaker 2: the way that North Carolina has functioned is it's sort
Speaker 2: of like the moderate human face of like the Greensboro massacre.
Speaker 3: Oh my, yeah. And so this is one of those
Speaker 3: where to start thing.
Speaker 4: There's a quote that I have in the piece by
Speaker 4: civil rights historian Timothy Tyson that, since I read it,
Speaker 4: I think over a decade ago, really just kind of
Speaker 4: hit me like a hammer and is kind of simple.
Speaker 4: All the experience I've seen as a you know, impoverished
Speaker 4: trans woman living in North Carolina and covering you know,
Speaker 4: local state government and how federal government works on the
Speaker 4: ground here too, Like beneath the green ivy of civility
Speaker 4: that a stone wall of coercion. Yeah, and that is
Speaker 4: one of the better summaries, and it applies other circumstances too,
Speaker 4: but it is it just perfectly sums up kind of
Speaker 4: the historical real the North Kinne Democratic Party. And when
Speaker 4: Tyson was doing that, he was tracing this whole history
Speaker 4: from the eighteen ninety eight Wilmington Cudaeta and massacre, which
Speaker 4: is one of the most decisive.
Speaker 3: Events in American history.
Speaker 4: And I'd even say in like the history of the
Speaker 4: rise of fascism too, to the current day. He was
Speaker 4: writing the late nineties and is part of a project
Speaker 4: of historians. And one of the terms they were using
Speaker 4: was has this progressive mystique while you were having governors
Speaker 4: on their southern states during the Civil Rights era, where
Speaker 4: you know, giving angry speeches from courthouses and things like that,
Speaker 4: and North Carolina was trying to be the moderate example
Speaker 4: of the South. Oh, you know, we put money into
Speaker 4: look at all these schools and roads were building this
Speaker 4: college system we're building. We just built Research Triangle Park,
Speaker 4: you know, we're we're attracting, you know. It's the too
Speaker 4: busy to hate kind of myth. And on that note,
Speaker 4: they generally were more careful about repression, but it still happened.
Speaker 4: You know, North crowd doesn't make the headlines and some
Speaker 4: of the like Selma did, for example, But there was
Speaker 4: a history of riots and a brutal attemps of repression
Speaker 4: from the forties all the way to the seventies yep,
Speaker 4: in North Carolina. And they happened like in almost every city,
Speaker 4: major city there is here, you know, and some that
Speaker 4: weren't so major.
Speaker 2: That's the thing that we've I've talked about a little
Speaker 2: bit on the show with the Holy Week uprising and
Speaker 2: the sort of the whole wave of riots kind of
Speaker 2: culminating in the assassination of Martin Luther King. But like, yeah,
Speaker 2: like statistically, most of the riots that happened in that
Speaker 2: entire period happened in these small and midsize cities. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that have just like this memory which has just been
Speaker 2: completely fucking buried. Yeah, and North Carolina, as you say,
Speaker 2: like it's one of the critical.
Speaker 3: Sites of this.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Durham was rioting in the forties. Yeah, like that,
Speaker 4: that's how far back it goes. And I think a
Speaker 4: lot of time people think, oh, well, not much happen
Speaker 4: in this era, and I think it's just a lack
Speaker 4: of knowledge of history, especially radical history. Did it not
Speaker 4: happen or was it suppressed? And then erase, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: and that happened a lot of this, So you had,
Speaker 4: you know, and figures like Governor Terry Samfert the time,
Speaker 4: who was you know, famous North Caroline Democrat. And yeah,
Speaker 4: if the klan was like openly marching to murder people,
Speaker 4: he might say like, okay, look a massacre's bad news.
Speaker 4: We are going to like put the state troopers out
Speaker 4: to them from doing that. But a lot of civil
Speaker 4: rights activists end up dead, yeah, you know, or there's
Speaker 4: still like violent crackdowns, you know, during the Greensboro if
Speaker 4: he was a site at both of some really well
Speaker 4: organized like civil rights efforts and sit ins and more
Speaker 4: radical action too, but also have a lot of repression.
Speaker 4: You know, by nineteen seventy nine, when the States boosters
Speaker 4: are portraying, you know, all that evil is a thing
Speaker 4: of the past, This anti racist marched or anti clan
Speaker 4: Mark specifically organized by this communist group in Greensboro, was
Speaker 4: massacred the clan and Neo Nazis came in. They just
Speaker 4: opened fire on people. Largely they were acquitted later and
Speaker 4: ensuing years, a lot of investigation has been done into
Speaker 4: this and various levels of local and state and aft
Speaker 4: the fact federal law enforcement were very complicit and things
Speaker 4: ranging from just kind of trying to sweep it under
Speaker 4: the rug to outright especially the local level like cooperating
Speaker 4: with the clan. A lot of them were either aware
Speaker 4: this is going on and did nothing to stop it,
Speaker 4: or even actively fed the clan information. There's a book
Speaker 4: recently called Morningside that goes into a lot of a
Speaker 4: lot of this detail that encourage folks to take a
Speaker 4: look at. But that's the reality of North Carolina, and
Speaker 4: that's the reality beneath the progressive mystique. And one of
Speaker 4: the historians I quote in the piece mentioned that this
Speaker 4: is an exquisite instrument of social control, because you've kind
Speaker 4: of already framed the discussion as, oh, it's just this
Speaker 4: genteel civil thing. We'll hear you out. Just be a
Speaker 4: little more patient. But if stuff ever really escalates, there
Speaker 4: is the option of just flat out smears violence and massacre,
Speaker 4: and knowing the history of North Carolina, you know a
Speaker 4: lot of this was directed at black North Carolinians, but
Speaker 4: also it was used to crush labor stuff. A lot
Speaker 4: of the people killed in the Greensboro massacre were also
Speaker 4: organizing in the textile mills. And North Carolina under the
Speaker 4: Democrats under their moderate period had and continues to have
Speaker 4: some of the most draconian anti labor laws in the country,
Speaker 4: which takes some work. So that's kind of the reality
Speaker 4: in North Carolina and of the Democratic Party here, and
Speaker 4: they lean on that mystique heavily, and honestly, I think
Speaker 4: a lot of it is what they evoke. As you know,
Speaker 4: we're the defenders of the sane, sensible civil status quo.
Speaker 4: Even saw some Mustein's statements about HBAO five when he
Speaker 4: did veto it, it's like, well, this is divisive, it's
Speaker 4: making too many ways. We need to get back to business,
Speaker 4: which they not just a business garment. They literally mean business.
Speaker 4: We're marketing the state and making more money and then
Speaker 4: never means making more money for the gentry. See, that's
Speaker 4: kind of the reality of North Carolina. Beneath this kind
Speaker 4: of you know how things supposedly are better and more
Speaker 4: progressive here in the end of the day, you can
Speaker 4: still get massacred.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think on a sort of structural level, right,
Speaker 2: I think there's going to be people who are being like, well, Okay,
Speaker 2: why the fuck do I give a shit about North Carolina?
Speaker 2: And one and this is something that you point out
Speaker 2: in the piece, and something that's really obvious if you
Speaker 2: spend literally any time in the South. Is that what
Speaker 2: I think? It's thirty six percent of the South is like,
Speaker 2: what's what's the actual number? I should have looked this
Speaker 2: up before.
Speaker 4: So of the national population of queer and trans people,
Speaker 4: thirty six percent live in the South, which is far
Speaker 4: more than any other region, like by a wide market
Speaker 4: I think, under the same twenty twenty three calculation. And
Speaker 4: there was another reason story that they came out swiftly
Speaker 4: about trans people. All these have h it is a
Speaker 4: general rule that trans people, especially in area where they
Speaker 4: are more legally and violently marginalized, are wildly undercounted. Ye,
Speaker 4: but it maps to about the same numbers I think
Speaker 4: of trains people in the country. The SME population is
Speaker 4: about thirty three to thirty six percent live in the
Speaker 4: South and in the in the twenty twenty three one
Speaker 4: The next highest amount live in the Midwest, which is
Speaker 4: kind of different from how you see things portrayed that
Speaker 4: you know, we're just this, yeah, this coastal you know it,
Speaker 4: lad Bohemians on a few coastal cities. As a matter
Speaker 4: of fact, there are a lot of trains people in
Speaker 4: the South and the Midwest. Yeah, we've been here for ages,
Speaker 4: We're still here. Yeah, Yeah, it's it's it's it's North Carolina,
Speaker 4: it's Texas, it's fucking New Orleans, West Virginia, Florida, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and again like in terms of like okay, so
Speaker 2: I'm not in those places, like A, but we all
Speaker 2: have a responsibility to all queer people as cooor people,
Speaker 2: right like we have we have, we have responsibility to
Speaker 2: each other, and we should fucking fight for each other.
Speaker 2: And b you can look at what happened in North Carolina,
Speaker 2: and it was deliberately This is the place where the
Speaker 2: right wing's anti trans strategy was born, and it was
Speaker 2: exported from the success that they had in North Carolina
Speaker 2: to the entire rest of the fucking country. Yes, right
Speaker 2: with the bathroom bills, and this is something we're going
Speaker 2: to get into it a second, with the way the
Speaker 2: Democratic Party like didn't react to those bathroom bills. The
Speaker 2: last point that I want to make here is that
Speaker 2: this strategy of control is also very similar to the
Speaker 2: one that the Democrats use in places like San Francisco,
Speaker 2: where you have this sort of progressive veneer over. You
Speaker 2: know that the constellation well I guess, I guess the
Speaker 2: constellation of class forces is getting more similar as big
Speaker 2: tech moves into like that part of the South. But
Speaker 2: you know, it's this constellation of like, oh, hey, we
Speaker 2: are the queer rights Party, but our actual interests are
Speaker 2: this combination of housing developers' landlords and tech giants, and
Speaker 2: so as an a of social control, we're going to
Speaker 2: do this like, hey, we're extremely pro trends stuff, and
Speaker 2: then we're going to throw a whole bunch of fucking
Speaker 2: trends homeless people into concentration camps. Yeah, and that's the
Speaker 2: thing that like, you know, we're gonna I'm going to
Speaker 2: talk more about this on the show another time. With
Speaker 2: the ways that Trump's anti homeless executive orders, some of
Speaker 2: the models for it are the way that sweeps have
Speaker 2: been working in places like Oakland's. We've talked about this
Speaker 2: on the show before, but yeah, this mechanism of social
Speaker 2: control is one that's really really widespread. And the South
Speaker 2: operates as a laboratory for that too, in the same
Speaker 2: way that it operates the laboratory for the right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think that's really important because since this
Speaker 4: is the point, I can't I can't hone this point
Speaker 4: enough and make it sharp enough. Frankly, folks need to
Speaker 4: take it really seriously. Whether you call the South or
Speaker 4: not fascist do the far right does, and they have
Speaker 4: for a long long time, if you did, not as
Speaker 4: a place to ignore, but as a place to consolidate
Speaker 4: power and try out their tactics. Too often, the left,
Speaker 4: even the queer left, has not. We have all suffered
Speaker 4: for it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is the whole thing for the historical
Speaker 2: left right, Like one of the things that broke the
Speaker 2: American labor movement was the defeat of the CIO in
Speaker 2: the South. Yeah, I mean all the way back to
Speaker 2: I mean events you were literally talking about, like the
Speaker 2: defeat of reconstruction. This is why this country is like this.
Speaker 2: And if you don't want the country to be like this,
Speaker 2: you have to fucking fight in the South. Yes, that's
Speaker 2: all we've got time for for today, But tomorrow we
Speaker 2: will be back to talk about the long and sordid
Speaker 2: history of the Democratic Party's progressive veneer in North Carolina
Speaker 2: and what truly lies beneath it, and we will look
Speaker 2: at how the original response to the twenty sixteen bathroom
Speaker 2: bills set the stage for both Democratic Party in North
Speaker 2: Carolina's passing ADVANTI trans laws today and the future of
Speaker 2: the rest of the country.
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