Speaker 1: Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions. Welcome back to It
Speaker 2: could Happen here, a podcast about it happening here. And
Speaker 2: in the original cadence of this website or website, in
Speaker 2: the original cadence of the show, that was a reference
Speaker 2: to a civil war, right, a new civil war. It
Speaker 2: could happen here. That's what season one was made a
Speaker 2: big splash. Now, we kind of covered the dystopia beat
Speaker 2: in general, but today we're getting back to our mother
Speaker 2: fucking roots because the state of Texas has recently declared
Speaker 2: a big old fuck you to the federal government are
Speaker 2: having its National guardsmen deploy razor wire at the border
Speaker 2: and stop border patrol people from, for example, performing rescues
Speaker 2: of people who are trapped in the water drowning.
Speaker 3: It's a whole thing.
Speaker 2: At least three migrants have already died as a result
Speaker 2: of this fuckery by Texas Governor Greg Abbott, and now like,
Speaker 2: I don't know, twenty states something near to that. There
Speaker 2: may be more by the time you hear this, but
Speaker 2: something like twenty states have declared that they're in support
Speaker 2: of Governor Abbott's refusal to let the FEDS in and
Speaker 2: insistence that he's dealing with an invasion and must take
Speaker 2: on the border texas'self, and some of those states are
Speaker 2: now sending or at least claim they're going to send
Speaker 2: national guardsmen. So when this all started happening, we all
Speaker 2: got a lot of messages. I got about a billion
Speaker 2: from people being.
Speaker 3: Like is this it? Is this the civil war?
Speaker 2: And obviously a big chunk of that comes from right
Speaker 2: wing memes because they are all talking about like, yeah,
Speaker 2: let's do it, let's have us a civil war. We're
Speaker 2: all going to start fighting over some guy posted his
Speaker 2: handgun collection like we're ready a.
Speaker 4: Bunch of revilvers.
Speaker 2: Yeah, stupid shit, it's stupid shit, But you know, it's
Speaker 2: not unreasonable to be like, this seems like a massive
Speaker 2: constitutional crisis that's potentially in line with some of the
Speaker 2: crises that precipitated the original Civil War. You've got a
Speaker 2: governor completely defying not now, not just you know, the
Speaker 2: president and the federal government, but the Supreme Court who
Speaker 2: ruled that you can't just have your fucking Texas goons
Speaker 2: stop a federal law enforcement agency from doing its.
Speaker 3: Job on the border.
Speaker 2: So you know, how serious is this and is this
Speaker 2: the kind of thing that's going to lead to a
Speaker 2: twenty four's new Civil War movie? And my quick take
Speaker 2: on this is no, probably not. I think what this
Speaker 2: is is, in fact, a governor stretching out his authority
Speaker 2: and testing how much he can get away with against
Speaker 2: the overall federal government because he and a lot of
Speaker 2: other conservative governors want to do things that are directly
Speaker 2: in contravention of the Civil Rights Act, of the Bill
Speaker 2: of Rights, of numerous federal protections for their citizens. And
Speaker 2: this is kind of a way of being like, well,
Speaker 2: if they won't fuck with us over this, then we
Speaker 2: can probably start imprisoning journalists and you know, killing people
Speaker 2: that or at least imprisoning people that otherwise we would
Speaker 2: not be able to write like this is a right
Speaker 2: wing power grab and it's an attempt to see is
Speaker 2: the central government weak enough that we can get away
Speaker 2: with this stuff. I don't think they're all going to
Speaker 2: start shooting at each other. I don't think Greg abbott
Speaker 2: is wants to get in a shooting war with the
Speaker 2: federal government over mostly the dimensions of the crisis are
Speaker 2: gend up and fake in terms of like what he
Speaker 2: is claiming it is. There is, in fact the humanitarian
Speaker 2: crisis at our border, but that's not what his issue is.
Speaker 2: So that's my quick take. We're going to get into
Speaker 2: more of all of that. But James, you are our
Speaker 2: resident border correspondent porrespondent, and you have some very strong
Speaker 2: feelings on how all of this has been interpreted in
Speaker 2: the media, So I wanted to pull to you first
Speaker 2: and then we'll get to Mia and we'll just kind
Speaker 2: of round table after that.
Speaker 5: I do, and in a rare instance for me, I
Speaker 5: have strong feelings about the way this has been covered,
Speaker 5: and strong feelings about the coverage of the border, which
Speaker 5: I know is the thing I talk about all the time.
Speaker 5: But I am beyond frustrated with the way this has
Speaker 5: been covered. It's hugely irresponsible and it's completely context free,
Speaker 5: Like there are people as there always are with the border,
Speaker 5: and there always are with the right who just tourists
Speaker 5: outside things that they understand and try and generate clicks
Speaker 5: by geeing up the fear of a civil war. And yes,
Speaker 5: I've seen dozens of people sharing headlines about national Guard deployments.
Speaker 5: So happened years ago. The National Guard have been deployed
Speaker 5: to our border for years. I see national Guard troops
Speaker 5: every day. I had a National Guard guy shooting me
Speaker 5: and shoot at me, shout at me.
Speaker 3: A friend of ours took one of their rifles.
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, the National Guard have been extremely based in
Speaker 5: arming the Butterfly Center. Yeah, they they're there. There's a
Speaker 5: federal deployment. Texas also has a state deployment. These are
Speaker 5: different things.
Speaker 2: And other states have also sent national guardsmen to the
Speaker 2: border before. By the correct this is not the first
Speaker 2: time this has happened.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, So there's a federal deployment and then there
Speaker 5: are state deployments. Both of those are distinct things. Something
Speaker 5: to know about the state deployment that is missing in
Speaker 5: the context free reporting that you're seeing is that these
Speaker 5: guys aren't getting any of their federal deployment benefits, so
Speaker 5: they won't be getting the tricare, they won't be getting
Speaker 5: the time towards their retirement, they won't be getting their
Speaker 5: GI bill, etc. So, like the Texas guys who are
Speaker 5: deployed on state orders are really the National Guard are
Speaker 5: getting barked by Greg Abbott Like it's laughable that that, Like,
Speaker 5: you know, he's pretending that he cares about Texas while
Speaker 5: actively screwing over and Robert and I have spoken to
Speaker 5: some of those Texas National Guard folks last time we
Speaker 5: were in Texas. Did not seem to be super motivated
Speaker 5: to be They're the only military unit I've seen tried
Speaker 5: to form a union because they're not in the federal
Speaker 5: They're not in the federal orders, so they can attempt
Speaker 5: to form a union.
Speaker 3: Get Billy bragged down to the border. We got to
Speaker 3: do this.
Speaker 5: Yeah, let's get Billy back. I'll get him going over
Speaker 5: the Rio Grande and when Billy bragg and they'll fix it.
Speaker 5: It has been the most dangerous deployment that they've had,
Speaker 5: including deployment to a rug They they have, unfortunately a
Speaker 5: habit of drinking and driving, which has not proven healthy
Speaker 5: for them. They also there's a quirk of Texas law
Speaker 5: that means that they can't stop National Guard soldiers from
Speaker 5: bringing their own firearms, yeah, which is great. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 5: and then us they can't stop them accidentally killing each
Speaker 5: other with their own firearms. Also, yeah, it's good stuff.
Speaker 5: A TG soldier did die trying to save a migrant
Speaker 5: from the river. Yes, he drowned. So like it has
Speaker 5: not like it is very boring but also quite dangerous deployment.
Speaker 5: You know, they have really high They wrote a manifesto
Speaker 5: a couple of years ago about how bullshit that deployment was,
Speaker 5: which is really great to death. Yeah, So much of
Speaker 5: this has been reported without any context, right, Like, I
Speaker 5: think genuinely a lot of the people reporting on this
Speaker 5: are not aware there have been national their National Guard
Speaker 5: here in California. Like I say, I see them all
Speaker 5: the time. They're not supposed to interdict migrants, but I
Speaker 5: see them doing surveillance, and I see them guarding open
Speaker 5: air prisons in Hiccumber almost every day, And I think
Speaker 5: that seems to have been missed by the majority of
Speaker 5: people covering this.
Speaker 4: Now we should talk more about the open air prison part,
Speaker 4: because I think there's a lot of people who seem
Speaker 4: to be getting the impression that the Biden administration is
Speaker 4: like actually substantively trying to do something to help immigrants,
Speaker 4: and like they're like this fight is like between like
Speaker 4: pro and anti immigration. It's like, no, there is a
Speaker 4: fight between whether you think these people should be killed
Speaker 4: incredibly quickly by accommodation of razor wire and rivers, or
Speaker 4: whether you think they should starve the day.
Speaker 5: Yeah, or die of dehydration walking through the desert, or
Speaker 5: die of hypothermia walking through the mountains. Like I I
Speaker 5: think I've said some of the podcasts before, but I
Speaker 5: was helping a three year old girl who was hypothermic
Speaker 5: last week, and like, that is what Joe Biden is doing.
Speaker 5: That is a Joe Biden policy being enacted by Joe
Speaker 5: Biden as Joe Biden wants it to be enacted, or
Speaker 5: at very least I'm sure his personal complicity or even
Speaker 5: understanding is relatively low. Given his understanding, it seems of
Speaker 5: a lot of things. But the Biden administration's policy is
Speaker 5: to deter people by making crossing more difficult and more dangerous,
Speaker 5: which de facto makes it more deadly. Abbott is doing
Speaker 5: with his razor wire and his floating fence is a
Speaker 5: version of the same thing, like they are not distinctly different.
Speaker 5: When everyone was up in arms about three people drowning,
Speaker 5: that's a tragedy. At eight hundred and fifty people died
Speaker 5: crossing the border in twenty twenty two, that was a
Speaker 5: normal day. Like the distinction is maybe in degree, but
Speaker 5: really it's an aesthetic between between Abbott and Biden and
Speaker 5: this and it's just two dudes chest stump each other
Speaker 5: trying to not look weak. There is not an option
Speaker 5: in the US system which allows you to vote for
Speaker 5: the party that doesn't want migrants to die, like like that,
Speaker 5: both of the parties are completely in lockstep on that.
Speaker 2: And let's let's let's be very clear about something. Part
Speaker 2: of why that is is because an overwhelming number of
Speaker 2: Americans are indifferent or actively hostile to the survival of migrants. Yes,
Speaker 2: like this is an It is incredibly unpopular in this
Speaker 2: country to think these people are human beings who deserve
Speaker 2: decent treatment in decent lives. This is a fight that
Speaker 2: the left has lost comprehensively, mostly in large part because
Speaker 2: the left has completely given up on it, which is
Speaker 2: why you've got fucking a lot of these nasbol assholes
Speaker 2: saying shit like you know, this is we have like
Speaker 2: like saying basically protectionist, nativist kind of shit these yes, right,
Speaker 2: because I.
Speaker 5: Think that like leftist media as also, and to include
Speaker 5: I guess liberal media also has completely oh yeah, like
Speaker 5: being complicit in this, right, Like the amount of stories
Speaker 5: that you will read about migrants that don't talk to
Speaker 5: migrants in the next few weeks will be a lot
Speaker 5: if you'd care to read them, right, And that's because
Speaker 5: people don't want to come here. They're either afraid of
Speaker 5: coming here or they don't want to take the time,
Speaker 5: they don't have the language skills. There are people who
Speaker 5: have the language skills who who don't get these jobs,
Speaker 5: and are people who don't have the language skills and
Speaker 5: who don't have the understanding of how the border on
Speaker 5: the ground works as opposed to immigration policy in DC works.
Speaker 5: And you're going to see a lot of people who
Speaker 5: don't live at the border, who don't come to the border,
Speaker 5: writing about the border and yeah, that's how we got here,
Speaker 5: and that's how we're getting to this largely like a
Speaker 5: giant panic about a nothing burger. But yeah, it's the
Speaker 5: reporting has been in continued to be responsible, and that
Speaker 5: is in some degree complicit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I think this is also the explanation for
Speaker 4: why there's a lot of people going like, why is
Speaker 4: Biden not like setting the troops? Why is Biden not
Speaker 4: cracking jobs? Does fucking give a shit? It's the same policy.
Speaker 4: He doesn't care, right Like, there's not actually substantive disagreement
Speaker 4: except over like whether it should be like some like
Speaker 4: a really stupid political stunt, over whether it should be
Speaker 4: like federal troops like on or federal agents like on
Speaker 4: the border, or whether it should be the razor wire
Speaker 4: like he doesn't care, you know.
Speaker 2: And to be fair, I will say I don't think
Speaker 2: this is the start. This right here, I don't think
Speaker 2: is the start of a civil war. We may if
Speaker 2: we have one. We may someday see this on like
Speaker 2: the list of factors contributing to in the years leading
Speaker 2: up to it. But I will say, if we do
Speaker 2: ever have a shooting civil war, it will be something
Speaker 2: this dumb that I feel absolutely certain of it will.
Speaker 2: It will be a thing where no one involved really
Speaker 2: cares about the issue that starts it. It's just a
Speaker 2: dick measuring contest that goes too far. I just don't
Speaker 2: think this is the dick measuring contest. But to be fair,
Speaker 2: it will be something this dumb. Don't worry, folks, don't worry.
Speaker 2: If we do start shooting each other, it will be
Speaker 2: just as supid as this.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I do think that, Like I think we're extremely
Speaker 5: likely to start of shooting civil war over this or
Speaker 5: in the next few years. Generally, I do think the
Speaker 5: chance of shooting my context without a CIVI awards, shooting
Speaker 5: specifically of migrants, especially in places where they're not safe,
Speaker 5: like open air attention centers, is going up. And yes,
Speaker 5: that scares the shit out of me, like as someone
Speaker 5: who spends a lot of his life there. And I
Speaker 5: do think that the I mean we saw in twenty eighteen, right,
Speaker 5: and we've covered this extensively. The Tree of Life shooting
Speaker 5: was in large part motivated by right wing rhetoric about
Speaker 5: a caravan of migrants. I was in Tijuana in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 5: I spent months of my life helping people down there.
Speaker 5: Like anyone who's scared of those people is paranoid at least,
Speaker 5: right that they were mostly fine, wonderful, very friendly people.
Speaker 5: I spent Christmas with them. But yeah, the twenty eighteen
Speaker 5: Tree of Life shooting came from paranoia about the border.
Speaker 5: We're seeing that same paranora from right wing media and
Speaker 5: from liberal media now, and I think that it would
Speaker 5: not be unreasonable to have that fear of individual acts
Speaker 5: of violence and terrorism along the border.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think one of the things we're going to have
Speaker 2: to do in the near future is get better at
Speaker 2: understanding kind of the media dimensions of conflicts like this
Speaker 2: and what is an irresponsible way to respond to them.
Speaker 2: And I think treating this like it is a civil
Speaker 2: war type deal is kind of feeding into the right's
Speaker 2: image of itself and their desire to treat this like
Speaker 2: their revolutionaries. Now, that said, what is the right thing
Speaker 2: to do, because, like the the what the Biden administrations
Speaker 2: seems to be doing right now is largely kind of
Speaker 2: ignoring it. I think at some point they will probably
Speaker 2: try to nationalize the guard and we'll see what happens.
Speaker 3: Then.
Speaker 2: One thing that's kind of worth noting is that this
Speaker 2: has primarily gone viral on right wing media. I'm seeing
Speaker 2: very little of this on mainstream centrist like liberal media sources.
Speaker 2: And I'm seeing little on this because like most of
Speaker 2: those sources don't really care about the border unless there's
Speaker 2: some way to like drum up fear against migrants like that,
Speaker 2: they'll do a caravan story. But this just simply doesn't sell.
Speaker 2: I think when it comes to like what is a
Speaker 2: responsible way to report on this, I think you have
Speaker 2: to start by centering what's actually happening to the migrants,
Speaker 2: what's being done to them, as opposed to focusing on
Speaker 2: this dick measuring, because that's the actual harm here. The
Speaker 2: harm here is not that Abbott has been mean to
Speaker 2: the border patrol, and it's not that Texas and these
Speaker 2: other states, these rebel states, are raising an army to
Speaker 2: fight the federal government. It's that there's this argument between
Speaker 2: the people in power in our country about like how
Speaker 2: bad should things be for people who are already desperate.
Speaker 2: And I think that's where you should center your focus. Also,
Speaker 2: I've just noticed this on my other screen. This is
Speaker 2: a bit off topic, but you know that movie Rebel
Speaker 2: Moon by Zack Snyder, Oh god, An, there's an ad
Speaker 2: for the canned water company Liquid Death that just is
Speaker 2: showing a bunch of like imperial troops from that movie
Speaker 2: beating a man and then drinking Liquid Death water as
Speaker 2: they relax afterwards, and It's the most unhinged ad I've
Speaker 2: ever seen. It's like running a side a Vox article.
Speaker 2: I've never seen anything like this before. It's just like,
Speaker 2: what the wait a second, what Zack Snyder? Come on,
Speaker 2: you can't do zax No, that fucking guy. Jesus talking
Speaker 2: of advertising, buy some liquid death.
Speaker 3: We're back.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So I want to talk about grift because we
Speaker 5: talked about advertising a bit. I don't know if you
Speaker 5: guys have seen the number of like right wing influences. Okay,
Speaker 5: so I'm looking at friend of the podcast, Tim Poole's
Speaker 5: Twitter here.
Speaker 2: Oh, Tim, there's a guy who is excited to have
Speaker 2: a civil war where he will be mrked immediately by
Speaker 2: one of his bodyguards.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there is a man who's seen combat and knows
Speaker 5: what it is to hear rounds cracking off over your head. Okay, Timple,
Speaker 5: I'm just going to quote here at ha ha ha
Speaker 5: ha ha etc. Fuck me, dude, and then Safe and
Speaker 5: Ready Meals dot com. Pool is not the only one
Speaker 5: on the buckets of food grift right. Alex Jones has
Speaker 5: been on this too. Oh yeah, a million years, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 5: He's been longtime, longtime food story guy at Alex Jones.
Speaker 5: A lot of these guys are like very clearly geeing
Speaker 5: up fears of civil war on the right so that
Speaker 5: they can sell people powder dry eggs like it's so transparent,
Speaker 5: Like it's in the same tweet. Yeah, sobiak Trump calls
Speaker 5: for all willing states to deploy National Guard to Texas
Speaker 5: border and start the deportations. And then as a special
Speaker 5: partner offer from my patriotsupply dot com god, which is
Speaker 5: the way to fuel your bigotry?
Speaker 2: I guess guys, two things. First off, if you buy
Speaker 2: your storable food from some right wing media grifters deal site,
Speaker 2: you will spend the apocalypse shitting yourself to death like
Speaker 2: it's all horrible. If you are going to buy, if
Speaker 2: you are going to throw a bunch of money on store.
Speaker 2: If you are a sane and reasonable person who wants
Speaker 2: to store food, learn how to make your own jerky.
Speaker 2: Learn how to can food. You can do it very cheaply.
Speaker 2: It is not expensive to can your own food. If
Speaker 2: you know what you're doing. You can can stuff that
Speaker 2: is in season and get it really cheap from the
Speaker 2: grocery store. And you can pickle and do other kinds
Speaker 2: of can't pressure canning. It's really economical and it will
Speaker 2: last a long time. If you are going to spend
Speaker 2: a shipload of money on storable, freeze dried food, you're
Speaker 2: going to be spending a bunch of money anyway. Just
Speaker 2: go buy Mountain House. By Mountain House. It's the good stuff.
Speaker 2: It's tasty as far as I know. No right winger
Speaker 2: advertises on them, and it's it's actually pretty good food. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's what I keep in my car. Emergencies. You will
Speaker 2: not ship ever ever again. Yeah, you may never poop again.
Speaker 2: But the fucking biscuits and gravy breakfast selection there. Man,
Speaker 2: when you're alone in the mountains, that ship is fucking fire.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that will. It is like a bung for the
Speaker 5: digestive system.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I just want to plug Lentils do org, which checked
Speaker 5: a websitels.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Lentils ship forever.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's find balance between the yin and the yang
Speaker 5: in your in your post a vocalypse life with Mountain
Speaker 5: House and Lentils do Org. You today, you know what's
Speaker 5: not running on Lentils guys. Unfortunately, this is not that pivot.
Speaker 5: I've just I've done the ol bait and switch it's
Speaker 5: this fucking convoy that's going to the border.
Speaker 3: I'll talk about this little Yeah, let's do that that.
Speaker 5: Like, this is where I'm really done with irresponsible reporting,
Speaker 5: like being like oh no, January sixth, Part two. Here's
Speaker 5: a link if you want to take part. Look, like,
Speaker 5: what the fuck is wrong with you is stop it?
Speaker 5: But I look, right wing groups have tried to run
Speaker 5: convoys probably a dozen times since twenty twenty. Right, I
Speaker 5: think we can all think of a different convoy that's
Speaker 5: got stuck under a bridge.
Speaker 4: When drove by my house and then basically didn't get
Speaker 4: any further than that.
Speaker 5: Yep, yep, they get lost. They disagree about directions.
Speaker 2: A lot of what a lot of people are going
Speaker 2: to realize is that the Texas border is twelve hours
Speaker 2: from anywhere in Texas when you are in Dallas. I
Speaker 2: believe this is accurate. When you are in Dallas, it
Speaker 2: is faster to drive to Chicago than it is to
Speaker 2: direct to the border. It is so fucking far away
Speaker 2: from anything you could cross Europe in the time it
Speaker 2: will take you to get down there.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I love the idea of a convoy of like you know,
Speaker 5: like completely c pilled lunatic you're sending on the town
Speaker 5: of MafA.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fucking passing Marathon and going where the christ.
Speaker 6: Are we.
Speaker 5: Like, yeah, like, it is a really really beautiful bike
Speaker 5: ride from MafA to the border. There's from dirt roads
Speaker 5: you can take.
Speaker 2: Oh and Marfa by the way, folks, if you're looking
Speaker 2: to go down to the border, very fun town. You'll
Speaker 2: have a good time in Marfa.
Speaker 5: Yeah, do love a bit of Marfa. Really, I'm not
Speaker 5: going to tell my Martha story. I'll tell you guys
Speaker 5: when we're done. But yeah, yeah, it is not like salacious.
Speaker 5: It's just yeah, Marfa is near the border. Lots of
Speaker 5: things are not. It is a very long way from
Speaker 5: I guess like maybe people could fly to a passer
Speaker 5: that's near the border. But yeah, it's this idea to
Speaker 5: those three convoys, right. One I think is supposed to
Speaker 5: go from Virginia Beach to Texas.
Speaker 3: Shares the way.
Speaker 2: Good luck, guys, enjoy spending seven thousand dollars in Gussie Yes,
Speaker 2: exactly where if they not looked at the cost of fuel,
Speaker 2: you fucking idiots have fun homies.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Another one is going from I think last Cruisays
Speaker 5: to Yuma and the one is going from here at
Speaker 5: Santa Cedro to Yuma. Yes, the drive from Santa Sedro
Speaker 5: to Humor is boring af but good luck, I guess,
Speaker 5: like good luck spending that Californa. Hopefully they get pull
Speaker 5: off at some of the gas stations like east of
Speaker 5: San Diego where it's still like six or seven dollars
Speaker 5: a gallon, because you're fucked if you need fuel there
Speaker 5: and you can't buy it from anyone else. But yeah,
Speaker 5: the idea that people are going to spend all their
Speaker 5: money like driving across the country's also just very like
Speaker 5: there's the meme right of the like the old white
Speaker 5: guy wearing Oakley wrap around or fake Oakley wrap around
Speaker 5: sunglasses doing selfie video in his car to rent about
Speaker 5: like anything and everything. But like, I think it's very
Speaker 5: illustrative of how many of these people don't feel safe
Speaker 5: outside their vehicles and like need the activism to involve
Speaker 5: their theft.
Speaker 2: Fifty Yeah, well, in part because most of them are,
Speaker 2: like most Americans, not in great shape, not physically imposing.
Speaker 2: So if you're sitting in an F two fifty, you
Speaker 2: feel big and powerful. Like James, you and I both
Speaker 2: have trucks. One of the things about trucks that is
Speaker 2: nice is that being in a truck, you're elevated above
Speaker 2: the rest of the road, right, Oh yeah, and that
Speaker 2: that gets to a lot of people's heads, especially if
Speaker 2: they have absolutely nothing else going on in their lives,
Speaker 2: which nobody participating in this fucking caravan does. So they
Speaker 2: this is like it's it's it's there. It's emotional support. Right,
Speaker 2: They're sitting in their truck, they've got their gun, They're
Speaker 2: not breathing hard because they have to like walk around
Speaker 2: the world, and they would desperately prefer that they can.
Speaker 2: That's where how their activism, that's how their participation in
Speaker 2: the Second Civil War will occur. Yeah, bunch of fucking wankers. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So I do want to get into kind of like
Speaker 2: what we do feel is the actual threats of this. Again,
Speaker 2: I think the danger here is you've got a lot
Speaker 2: of kind of fights going down about like how far
Speaker 2: can governments take their anti trans legislation, How mean can
Speaker 2: they be to undocumented immigrants, Like how much violence can
Speaker 2: they deploy in deporting people? What can they do to journalists?
Speaker 2: What can they do to people speaking out or engaging
Speaker 2: in protest without violating the Bill of Rights. You know,
Speaker 2: what can they do to marginalized communities about virrelating the
Speaker 2: Civil Rights Act?
Speaker 3: I think this is an.
Speaker 2: Attempt to set a precedent for ignoring federal control so
Speaker 2: that they can be crueler to large groups of people
Speaker 2: within their purview. And I think a lot of this
Speaker 2: is a reaction to this is kind of there, what
Speaker 2: if we lose this election?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: I think there is a fear. And I don't necessarily
Speaker 2: think this fear is actually like born out. I don't
Speaker 2: think the Rights National hopes in terms of its ability
Speaker 2: to get elected again after Trump are as poor as
Speaker 2: people want them to be, as I might want them
Speaker 2: to be. But I think there is real fear among
Speaker 2: the right that if Trump doesn't win this, they're not
Speaker 2: going to win the presidency again, right, And I think
Speaker 2: part of what they are doing is setting up all, right,
Speaker 2: then we will just take over and take increasing autonomy
Speaker 2: in our red states, and we will effectively govern them
Speaker 2: very differently and govern them in contravention of how the
Speaker 2: rest of the country and how the federal government of
Speaker 2: the Supreme Court says that they can be governed, because
Speaker 2: we can't be cruel enough without that and I think
Speaker 2: that is what they are stepping up to be able
Speaker 2: to do. If you're asking you know, what do I
Speaker 2: think will be sort of like line crossings that could
Speaker 2: lead to to mass social violence in this country. One thing,
Speaker 2: I don't think they're going to take that leap while
Speaker 2: a Democrat is in control of the federal government in
Speaker 2: the Defense Department. I think they will push for a
Speaker 2: violent crackdown on everything left of the far right if
Speaker 2: they win power again, because they talk about that repeatedly,
Speaker 2: because they've promised to do that, and I think that
Speaker 2: if they lose, there's an off chance. I don't think
Speaker 2: this is likely, but it's not impossible that protests and
Speaker 2: violence as acts of protest against Biden winning a second
Speaker 2: term could snowball into something that resembles an insurgency. Not impossible.
Speaker 2: I don't think that's the likeliest outcome. But I don't
Speaker 2: see them starting to shoot at federal troops now while
Speaker 2: Biden is in the White House. For one thing, I
Speaker 2: feel like that's the thing that would really clinch it
Speaker 2: for Biden. If Texas National Guard trying to secede, well,
Speaker 2: you've made his reelection campaign easier, right, because now none
Speaker 2: of the red states. None of the states that secede.
Speaker 2: You can't also have an election where those states get
Speaker 2: to vote, right, Like, that's that's just not the way
Speaker 2: it works. Yeah, so I don't feel like that's the
Speaker 2: likeliest thing I think this is. Yeah, I think I've
Speaker 2: made it clear what I think, and I think it's
Speaker 2: really clear that it's time for our second dad break.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 5: Hopefully it's an ad for the new transpried oreos. Have
Speaker 5: you guys seen those?
Speaker 4: Yeah? No, have you not seen those?
Speaker 1: What?
Speaker 7: Wait?
Speaker 5: Trans fried oreo? Well, yeah, maybe it's just me. I
Speaker 5: was just reading a story earlier and I just.
Speaker 4: Trans fat or No, they have like a blue transplant.
Speaker 2: Oh well, okay, they have.
Speaker 4: Years ago.
Speaker 2: Hold on, this is okay, okay, okay, let's say I
Speaker 2: don't really have.
Speaker 5: Woke woke biscuit.
Speaker 2: That's good, I have. I have no opinion on this.
Speaker 2: I guess it's good Oreos aren't bigoted.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, don't money to me instead.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't think it really matters. Side there. Ah,
Speaker 2: we're back.
Speaker 8: You know.
Speaker 4: One thing I think about like part of why this
Speaker 4: is going viral, and I think part of what's an
Speaker 4: issue about this with the way it's being talked about
Speaker 4: on the left, but also you know, the way, the
Speaker 4: way it's marketable to the right is that the thing
Speaker 4: about this confrontation is that it looks like a civil war,
Speaker 4: but it looks like it's it's it's exactly perfectly engineered
Speaker 4: to look like the lead Civil war one, And that
Speaker 4: is incredibly misleading. It's it's it's it's basically it's like
Speaker 4: a marketing thing, right, because like, yeah, and this is
Speaker 4: only thing we've talked about on this show for like
Speaker 4: literally since day one, is that like a civil war
Speaker 4: in the United States is not going to look like
Speaker 4: a bunch of states like form an alliance and then
Speaker 4: all they're fighting all of the other states. Like it's
Speaker 4: it's not going to look like that. It's going to
Speaker 4: look closer to Syria than it is going to look
Speaker 4: like like the first Civil War. But people haven't shaken
Speaker 4: like the sort of like brainworms of a civil war
Speaker 4: is like sixteen states fight sixteen states, even though every
Speaker 4: single civil war that we've had, like in the intervening
Speaker 4: like one hundred like two hundred years, has not been that.
Speaker 2: And here's here's how wrong. Here's how people are comprehensively
Speaker 2: wrong about this. Right on the left side, you have lmao,
Speaker 2: you guys are going to fight the federal government with
Speaker 2: your AR fifteen's. They got bombs and planes, and like, well,
Speaker 2: we've seen how well our bombs and planes work against insurgencies.
Speaker 2: We're not good at winning those. If there were any
Speaker 2: real insurgency, and there's certainly ingredients to it, it would
Speaker 2: actually be a problem for the US. However, that does
Speaker 2: not look like sixteen states declaring themselves succeeded and going
Speaker 2: to because that's a conventional war. And you know what
Speaker 2: happened if Greg Abbott started a conventional war against the US.
Speaker 2: Greg Abbott doesn't have a fucking bunker, right like we could,
Speaker 2: we could, he could be he could.
Speaker 3: Be blown up.
Speaker 2: He is again nothing against being in a wheelchair, But
Speaker 2: this is not a man who is capable of like
Speaker 2: living underground and hiding from federal bombers. Like that's just
Speaker 2: not the kind of conflict that you need to be
Speaker 2: concerned about.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this this man does not have the big lawden
Speaker 4: dog in him.
Speaker 3: He just does not know he's sure, he sure doesn't.
Speaker 2: He the idea of Greg Abba taking to a hate
Speaker 2: system in doing a Tora bora Texas. He's hand out
Speaker 2: and fucking yeah, fucking big bend or whatever. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 2: Torah boring big bend. Jesus Christ.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it will be outstanding. We would love to see it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, grainy photos of Greg Abbott and like the
Speaker 2: mountains of Southern Texas shaking hands with Mexican revolutionaries as
Speaker 2: they smel rifles to him, rifles they also got from
Speaker 2: the United States. That is what we call the circle
Speaker 2: of life.
Speaker 5: Oh good god, we can we can dream, but it
Speaker 5: does seem unfortunately unlikely. Yeah, it would be very funny.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: See Sealed Team go off to Greg Abbott.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Sealed Team fighting the Texas Rangers off only.
Speaker 4: If only.
Speaker 5: Just a bunch of dudes each with a revolver because
Speaker 5: they thought it looked cool until the very first time
Speaker 5: someone was shooting back at them.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's it's a real like who has who is on
Speaker 2: the most HGH competition? Whoever, whoever can stop the steroids
Speaker 2: from flooding in is going to win. That's the spice
Speaker 2: in this particular conflict. Yea, we would love to see
Speaker 2: Joe Rogan's the baron Harcone and of making sure everybody
Speaker 2: spec ops, guys have enough gear floating above a fucking table. Great,
Speaker 2: it would be wonderful in some senses. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 2: think we're going to see a sheet word about It
Speaker 2: will be interesting to see how like Biden has screwed
Speaker 2: the pooch in terms of like his media management of this,
Speaker 2: I would say, And it will be interesting to see
Speaker 2: how hard he goes in response, Like if he goes
Speaker 2: back in response, I think the smart answer would be
Speaker 2: nationalize the Guard. If there's things that you can actually
Speaker 2: prosecute people over, prosecute them and continue to not deal
Speaker 2: with it in the media. Like his instinct isn't bad
Speaker 2: in terms of not wanting to feed in directly to
Speaker 2: the right wing outrage loop, but you still have to
Speaker 2: You still have to go after them for this, right,
Speaker 2: And it's the kind of thing it's probably like too
Speaker 2: much to hope for any real action being taken. But
Speaker 2: I would say that's probably the smarter option, right not
Speaker 2: to say anything of like what the most moral thing
Speaker 2: to do is, but the smart option is don't feed
Speaker 2: into the fundraising loop, because we should probably get in
Speaker 2: on that this is all a fundraising thing, right. In addition,
Speaker 2: to them testing the waters. That's the biggest dimension of
Speaker 2: this is and that's why we talked earlier. All of
Speaker 2: these guys Timpoole and Jack Pisoviec, and I'm sure the
Speaker 2: Daily Wire guys are in it now, are like advertising
Speaker 2: their storable foods companies and shit. The point of all this,
Speaker 2: all right wing messaging, all far right messaging, starts as
Speaker 2: a grift. It all starts with a product to sell. That's,
Speaker 2: by the way, how guns became so enmeshed with the
Speaker 2: far right right. A lot of gun companies realize that
Speaker 2: like Americans only need so many guns for like reasonable
Speaker 2: self defense and hunting and even even recreational purposes. There's
Speaker 2: only so many guns a man could shoot at a time.
Speaker 2: But you can really get people to stockpile shit like
Speaker 2: crazy if you convince them they're like preparing to be
Speaker 2: gorilla fighters in a future civil war. And so and
Speaker 2: a lot of these like gun tuber influencers, that's kind
Speaker 2: of where they increasingly went because that's where the money was.
Speaker 2: And so this becomes more and more of a part
Speaker 2: of right wing politics because a lot of people on
Speaker 2: the right have a lot of money to be made
Speaker 2: in messaging this kind of stuff and selling this kind
Speaker 2: of stuff. The same thing is true with the civil warshit.
Speaker 2: It's true with these like fears that the government. You know,
Speaker 2: we can sell you storable food, we can sell you
Speaker 2: fucking bunkers. All of this stuff comes out of some
Speaker 2: sort of financial grift. And the biggest thing that most
Speaker 2: of the people involved in this are hoping for. Fucking
Speaker 2: Jack Pisobiec doesn't want to be fucking hiding underground getting
Speaker 2: bombed by the US Air Force. Jack Pisobiec wants to
Speaker 2: make another million dollars off of affiliate sales of bullshit, Right,
Speaker 2: that's what And a lot of these people, these guys
Speaker 2: doing this caravans to the borders, they're not planning on
Speaker 2: spending their own money on gas. They're hoping that they
Speaker 2: can crowdfund a shitload of money. And I'm sure one
Speaker 2: of them will steal all of it and run away, Right,
Speaker 2: That's what usually happens with this kind of shit. But
Speaker 2: that's what they're all hoping to do. And so that's
Speaker 2: kind of the over if you want to actually hurt them,
Speaker 2: if you're looking at where do we how do we
Speaker 2: draw a strategic victory out of this, find a way
Speaker 2: to damage their ability to profit off of this shit.
Speaker 2: And I do think part of it is not making
Speaker 2: this as big a story as that otherwise might be.
Speaker 2: But that's not simply enough, because the right is large
Speaker 2: enough that just through their media hyping this up, they
Speaker 2: can make a decent amount of money off this stuff.
Speaker 2: So more complex solutions are needed.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I do think we should probably discuss like the
Speaker 5: potential of Abbot using this in a personal like later
Speaker 5: our presidential run, right, Like, yeah, he's in New Delhi
Speaker 5: at the moment.
Speaker 3: Have you seen here?
Speaker 2: He's a New Delhi hanging out with everybody's favorite pseudo
Speaker 2: dictator of India Modi.
Speaker 5: Yeah, like Abbott trying to build this kind of like
Speaker 5: electoral alliance and international alliance for like fascist like Wolfenstein
Speaker 5: America is is. I think like it's concerning because like
Speaker 5: Trump has a lot of baggage and I think obviously
Speaker 5: he has a great degree of personal support switching in
Speaker 5: the primaries. But if they don't make if they don't
Speaker 5: stick the landing with Trump, I think Abbot is waiting
Speaker 5: in the wings to make that perhaps the more competent
Speaker 5: fascists than Trump and make an attempt at running for
Speaker 5: the presidency.
Speaker 3: Not good anything else to say, fuck.
Speaker 4: All of them, Yeah, that's it. Sure, But okay, So
Speaker 4: the other thing that you actually can do about this
Speaker 4: is that look, this bullshit, all of this stuff is
Speaker 4: going to continue until there's actually some kind of sustained
Speaker 4: attack by the left on like politically on the border regime.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 4: That was a thing that when I when I was like,
Speaker 4: you know, when I was like like coming up like
Speaker 4: twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen, twenty eight, and we were doing right,
Speaker 4: there was Occupy Ice. There was like there were massed demonstrations,
Speaker 4: there was like critical pleasure being applied, and we didn't
Speaker 4: go far enough. Part of the reason we didn't go
Speaker 4: far enough is a lot of people fucking a lot
Speaker 4: of very optimistic political groups, like including like PSL et cetera,
Speaker 4: et cetera, like hijacked a lot of these things and
Speaker 4: pulled people off of occupations. But you know, there was
Speaker 4: actually there were there have been periods in my lifetime,
Speaker 4: like not that long ago, where there was actually forward
Speaker 4: progress being made about this ship to the point where
Speaker 4: like even that we're like the Democrats were trying to
Speaker 4: co opt it, and it doesn't fucking have to be
Speaker 4: like this, Like we don't. We don't have to have
Speaker 4: hundreds of people fucking dying at the border every year.
Speaker 4: We don't have to have people in open air fucking prisons.
Speaker 4: It doesn't have to be like this. We can fight
Speaker 4: them and we can win, but it requires actually like
Speaker 4: it requires actually going and fighting, and you know, you
Speaker 4: have you have to you have to actually be willing
Speaker 4: to do this. You have to be willing to commit
Speaker 4: to the organizing. But if we don't, if we just
Speaker 4: keep leaving all of this ship to like just the
Speaker 4: literal howling fascists and then Biden who is like it,
Speaker 4: like on on the border doing the same thing but
Speaker 4: not being but not like howling about it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: you know, like this this this, this country is going
Speaker 4: to go into fucking oblivion and we are we are going,
Speaker 4: like you're you're going to see in your lifetime the
Speaker 4: US government shooting people on the board like with machine guns.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 4: If we don't stop this fucking now, that is that
Speaker 4: is what you are going to live to see. And
Speaker 4: it does not. We don't. We don't have to. We
Speaker 4: don't have to live in that world. But you have
Speaker 4: to act now.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think that's a great Like it is also
Speaker 5: within our power to like, there is not a voting option,
Speaker 5: but there is always a mutual aid option at the border.
Speaker 5: And I know I bang on about this, but like,
Speaker 5: if you are within range of the border, you can
Speaker 5: go and help. If you're not, there are migrant communities
Speaker 5: in your city, in your town who need your help.
Speaker 5: And like, the way we get through to our boomer
Speaker 5: uncles and Facebook ants and stuff is by showing them
Speaker 5: that migrants are people with stories who are just the
Speaker 5: same as you, and they just want a chance to
Speaker 5: raise their kids someone where they're not going to get
Speaker 5: fucking killed by a car bomb. And that the more
Speaker 5: human interactions more people going to have with migrants, and
Speaker 5: the more stories we can tell that's center migrants as people,
Speaker 5: artest numbers or tsunami or any fg humanizing gretoric like,
Speaker 5: the more likely we are to take the teeth out
Speaker 5: of this. And that's something that all of us can do. Yes,
Speaker 5: all right, So that's a good thing to end on.
Speaker 2: And obviously by our storable foods, go to pissing my
Speaker 2: Pants dried Foods dot net and use promo code Robert
Speaker 2: Evans says the apocalypse is coming. It's a very long
Speaker 2: promo code, but you will get Actually it increases the
Speaker 2: price by fifteen percent, but please do it anyway. Yeah,
Speaker 2: well we get more money. That's gonna be it for
Speaker 2: us here, And it could happen here until next time.
Speaker 2: I don't know, go to sleep with dreams of a
Speaker 2: jdam taking out Greg Abbott right in the Austin Capitol Building.
Speaker 2: Just bam baby. It won't happen, but it is a
Speaker 2: funny thing to think about.
Speaker 4: Welcome to Dick It Happened Here, a podcast that is
Speaker 4: in no small part about the increasing and escalating series
Speaker 4: of anti trans laws being passed around the country. It's
Speaker 4: another one of those episodes. Things are getting worse, things
Speaker 4: are also getting weird. And with me to talk about
Speaker 4: worse and weird is Kay and Lee from Health Liberation
Speaker 4: Now welcome to the show.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I'm excited to talk to you both because, Okay, very
Speaker 4: very odd stuff has been happening. So the main reason
Speaker 4: I wanted to have Eat You on is to talk
Speaker 4: about the stuff that's been happening in Ohio. So for
Speaker 4: people who are unaware, Ohio's legislature has been trying to
Speaker 4: pass a very draconian ban on all gender firmcare for minors.
Speaker 4: The States Republican governor vetoed the bill, and this was
Speaker 4: for about one day. There was a lot of sort
Speaker 4: of like liberal cheering about like ah a compassionate Republicans,
Speaker 4: blah blah blah blah. And then immediately after that, like
Speaker 4: like like the next day, when all of all of
Speaker 4: us we haven't even like we hadn't even really gotten
Speaker 4: into the weight hold on, He's going to do something else.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 4: The thing that Dwine did is is you know, and
Speaker 4: this is this is being framed as like an attempt
Speaker 4: to stave off the veto, which hasn't worked so far.
Speaker 4: But he immediately implemented a bunch of rules that say
Speaker 4: that in order to get gender firming care, and this
Speaker 4: is true of both minors and adults, which makes it
Speaker 4: in a lot of ways more draconian than the actual bill.
Speaker 4: It's quote unquote supposed to be preventing like getting passed.
Speaker 4: If you want to get gender refirming care, you need
Speaker 4: recommendations from a psychiatrist, an endocrinologist, and a bioethicist. And
Speaker 4: also all gender firmingcare in the state has to be
Speaker 4: reported to the government, and there's like other stuff too.
Speaker 4: So this is the technical term for this is this
Speaker 4: is extremely bad.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, I mean he also signed an executive
Speaker 1: order just banning surgery for everyone under eighteen too.
Speaker 4: Yeah so yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean also I think I believe it was
Speaker 1: like everyone under twenty one also had to go through
Speaker 1: six months of counseling as well.
Speaker 8: Yes, yeah, at least six months of counseling. Yeah, there's
Speaker 8: no upper.
Speaker 6: Cap mm hmm.
Speaker 1: And like a lot of this was the wine and
Speaker 1: his spokespeople have ended up like justifying a lot of this,
Speaker 1: like trying to use language from clinicians working at clinics
Speaker 1: in Ohio that see trans youth and be like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, they're taking this comprehensive multidisciplinary approach, and most
Speaker 1: of the people they see like get counseling instead of
Speaker 1: medical transitions. So they're actually like using a lot of
Speaker 1: the testimony against the band to try to justify these
Speaker 1: rules and regulations. And I don't think they're acting in
Speaker 1: good faith because when you actually like look up the
Speaker 1: details are like, well, this would basically make it almost
Speaker 1: impossible for anyone at any age to transition. But it's
Speaker 1: like you know, it's a very sneaky smart move right,
Speaker 1: like being like, oh, look, we're trying to find a compromise.
Speaker 1: We're trying to make sure everyone gets good healthcare. And
Speaker 1: you know, unfortunately sometimes liberals and liberal media i'll just
Speaker 1: kind of eat that up without really looking at the details.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And one of the things that's happening here too
Speaker 4: is that so the US, where in places where there's
Speaker 4: pretty good access to gender a firming healthcare, it works
Speaker 4: off of something called informed consent. And informed consent is
Speaker 4: like okay, so you go there, they tell you what
Speaker 4: is going to happen, and you talk, you talk to
Speaker 4: like a nurse or a doctor, and then once you
Speaker 4: know the like what you're actually getting into, you say
Speaker 4: yes or no if you want to do something right.
Speaker 4: And you know, this is a this is a pretty
Speaker 4: good system. It still can be really annoying to navigate
Speaker 4: because of insurance stuff, and you know, like there's definitely
Speaker 4: problems with it, but it's a it's a much better
Speaker 4: system than exists in a lot of places. And you know,
Speaker 4: I think there have been two sets of comparisons about
Speaker 4: what these restrictions look like. And we're going to get
Speaker 4: to the comparisons to uh tart restrictions on abortion in
Speaker 4: a second, But I want to talk about another thing
Speaker 4: that these restrictions strike me as very similar to, which
Speaker 4: is the British system. And the way the British system
Speaker 4: works is you get put on a wait list and
Speaker 4: then you die, or you go to our media like
Speaker 4: those are those are your options?
Speaker 9: Right?
Speaker 4: Or or you're really wealthy and you can you can
Speaker 4: bypass the public healthcare system and go to the private
Speaker 4: healthcare system. But you know, like I hope, like I
Speaker 4: hope you are like the air to mansion before you
Speaker 4: start that process, or you're in serious trouble. The thing
Speaker 4: about the British system is there's all of these paths
Speaker 4: of interlocking experts. You have to go through it every
Speaker 4: single you have to get signatures from every single one
Speaker 4: of them. And what this means is you have this enormous,
Speaker 4: sort of interminable British gender bureaucracy whose only job and
Speaker 4: only the only thing they want to do is stop
Speaker 4: you from getting healthcare. There's a very very good Philosophy
Speaker 4: Tube episode about this about what it's actually like to
Speaker 4: be in that system, and it's terrible, and this is
Speaker 4: a this is what the kinds of things that are
Speaker 4: being proposed here are. In a lot of they're it's
Speaker 4: not exactly the same, it's the British system, but it's
Speaker 4: it's bringing it much closer to that system where it's
Speaker 4: basically impossible to get healthcare. And the thing about the
Speaker 4: British system and about these restrictions where you know you
Speaker 4: have to have like a bioethicistant, a psychiatrist and endocrinologist
Speaker 4: and you have to like do all you have to
Speaker 4: jump through all of these troops, is that at every
Speaker 4: single point in the pri there is another gender bureaucrat
Speaker 4: who can just by themself decide that they're just doing
Speaker 4: a trans healthcare band. And you know, every every individual
Speaker 4: person you put into the process is another person who
Speaker 4: could just say no. And that's what the bridge system works,
Speaker 4: is that someone in the process just says no and
Speaker 4: you die in a wait list. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, we know trans people in Britain and in
Speaker 1: other European countries where they have like a lot of gatekeeping,
Speaker 1: and you know, all of them have warned us like
Speaker 1: you do not want this coming to the US. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, reminding us like all the time, like how
Speaker 1: much easier. Are a lot of US trans people have
Speaker 1: it in terms of accessing healthcare, and just like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean everything I've heard about, like the UK healthcare
Speaker 1: system sounds like nightmarish. People asking invasive questions about like
Speaker 1: your sexuality or your trauma history or for youth that
Speaker 1: often ends up like involving like genital inspections for some reason,
Speaker 1: it just sounds like a horrible, dehumanizing, violating experience. And
Speaker 1: then yeah, like a lot of people like spend years,
Speaker 1: years and years if they you know, and are lucky
Speaker 1: if they do it, are able to access care. A
Speaker 1: lot of people have to go private if they can
Speaker 1: afford to.
Speaker 8: Honestly, before, I mean technically it was during but before
Speaker 8: the full like onslaught of bills started to hit the US,
Speaker 8: Like there were Brits that were trying to sound the
Speaker 8: alarm and get the message out to US base.
Speaker 6: Yeah, like it was.
Speaker 1: Around when the Currabell ruling happened. Crabelle was a d
Speaker 1: trans woman who's later was affiliated with the ADF, with
Speaker 1: the British branch of Alliance depending Freedom, which is behind
Speaker 1: a lot of the It's like an international Christian nationalist
Speaker 1: organization that's behind a lot of the healthcare bands in
Speaker 1: the US as well, also the abortion birth control. Yeah,
Speaker 1: really nasty people. But anyway, so like Currabell, this d
Speaker 1: trends woman, It's like she sued.
Speaker 6: The NHS.
Speaker 1: For allowing her to transition and originally like won her
Speaker 1: case and that led to basically.
Speaker 10: Like the end of.
Speaker 6: Transitioning for you. Yeah, she submitted a judicial review.
Speaker 8: The initial review was favorable to her, but upon further review,
Speaker 8: the appeals did end up overturning it. But by that point,
Speaker 8: the damage had already been done. Yeah, a bunch of
Speaker 8: people were starting to lose access to care, and the
Speaker 8: likes and the wheels were starting to spin internally as
Speaker 8: well in terms of the Tavistock system and so like.
Speaker 8: As a result, like the wait lists just ended up
Speaker 8: getting longer and.
Speaker 6: Longer and longer.
Speaker 1: So that was like a huge blow that happened in
Speaker 1: the UK and like UK trails people like basically like
Speaker 1: by that point, it starting trying to warn people in
Speaker 1: the US like this is going to come for you too, Yeah,
Speaker 1: like get ready, like they had already been already been
Speaker 1: like suffering under this like no anti transplants for a while,
Speaker 1: and they knew it was going to spread down the
Speaker 1: borders of the UK, and unfortunately it has.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 8: In like the very early stages of our project, when
Speaker 8: we launched at the beginning of twenty twenty one, almost
Speaker 8: immediately after the Carabell initial ruling, we hosted a transcript
Speaker 8: of a podcast from Blood and Turf that was trying
Speaker 8: to deliver this message over to US based comrades, and
Speaker 8: unfortunately it does not appear to have reached as many
Speaker 8: people as it really needed to. But we do have
Speaker 8: that available in the event that people can still learn
Speaker 8: from it, because this onslot is not going to stop.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's not.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I think one of the things that we're
Speaker 4: seeing now is that we're now seeing kind of an
Speaker 4: opening of new fronts in a way where you have,
Speaker 4: in the same state at the same time you have
Speaker 4: both what I guess I would call the American style
Speaker 4: approach of just straight up bands and then this kind
Speaker 4: of an attempt to implement this sort of British like,
Speaker 4: you know, attempt to implement this sort of like British
Speaker 4: ender bureaucracy system. And one of the things that's been
Speaker 4: happening with this is, you know, Okay, so there's a
Speaker 4: lot of places where there's inspirations coming for this, and
Speaker 4: I think, you know, we mentioned it briefly earlier. One
Speaker 4: of the inspirations for this is obviously parp restrictions on abortion,
Speaker 4: where you have these like unbelievably restricted like basically these
Speaker 4: targeted things. When before, before Roe v. Wade collapsed, there
Speaker 4: was you know, you could you could ban abortions by
Speaker 4: for example, you know, saying like passing a bill that
Speaker 4: says that, like, okay, if you want to do abortions
Speaker 4: in a hospital, the walls in the hallways have to
Speaker 4: be like exactly like this diameter, which is not the
Speaker 4: same diameter as like as as normal hospital walls are.
Speaker 4: So now you can't do abortions in hospitals, And so
Speaker 4: they do things like this, right, and this is you know,
Speaker 4: and this has been a huge problem for a long time.
Speaker 4: Answer anti abortion activists have been talking about it for ages.
Speaker 4: The Democrat Party did nothing. So you know, that's I think,
Speaker 4: I think it's sort of like forwarding of where this
Speaker 4: is going.
Speaker 8: Yeah, a direct parallel is actually over in Arizona, if
Speaker 8: I remember correctly, because one of the things that they
Speaker 8: ended up doing down in Arizona is a requirement that
Speaker 8: they tried to implement was this rather controversial piece where
Speaker 8: they also had to provide information on abortion reversals using
Speaker 8: certain types.
Speaker 6: Of hormone care.
Speaker 8: Right, similar to how in order for people to be
Speaker 8: able to provide gender firming care they have to provide
Speaker 8: information about detransition and stuff like that. But when you
Speaker 8: actually start to look at some of the data, not
Speaker 8: all of it, but it's some of the data that
Speaker 8: they are relying on to inform people of this, it
Speaker 8: is a wildly biased sample or just downright pseudoscience. Right, Like,
Speaker 8: they looked at the evidence base for the abortion reversals
Speaker 8: and it didn't actually work the way that they were
Speaker 8: saying it was, and it was actually coming from very
Speaker 8: very very.
Speaker 6: Explicitly motivated groups. Right.
Speaker 8: So, Yeah, like abortion has been difficult to access in
Speaker 8: Arizona for a very long time in part because of
Speaker 8: some of these like obnoxious requirements that people end up
Speaker 8: putting into place through trap laws.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And you know, I think it's it's worth noting that, like,
Speaker 4: and this is true of both the anti trans bands
Speaker 4: and the and anti abortion legislation, is that, like it's
Speaker 4: the science, they're just making it up. A lot of
Speaker 4: the time, Like, you know, one of the like one
Speaker 4: of the very famous things is these like fetal heartbeat
Speaker 4: bills that required like and the thing about like fetal
Speaker 4: heartbeat bills is that fetuses don't have heartbeats. You're not
Speaker 4: hearing a heartbeat, Like doctors will like force you to
Speaker 4: listen to this. It's like that it's not what's happening.
Speaker 4: It's literally not a heartbeat. But these people, like they
Speaker 4: put a stethoscope to a women's chest and heard a
Speaker 4: beating and we're like, oh shit, it's the baby's heart.
Speaker 4: And it's like, no, it doesn't have a heart, Like wait,
Speaker 4: this is a fetus, Like what are you even talking about?
Speaker 4: But you know, and this kind of stuff, right is
Speaker 4: you know, they're they're they're they're basically they're they're doing
Speaker 4: just scientific malpractice, right, They're straight up lying to people,
Speaker 4: and then they're using that as a justification for you know,
Speaker 4: actual legislation which has sort of material impact and like
Speaker 4: you know, carries the force of the law behind it.
Speaker 6: Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 4: And we've been seeing a lot of very similar kinds
Speaker 4: of things from from these anti trans legislation and one
Speaker 4: of one of the ways that they've been able to
Speaker 4: use sort of pseudoscience, it's to get restrictions on healthcare past.
Speaker 4: And this is true both of sort of the straight
Speaker 4: up bands and also of these kind of like massive
Speaker 4: bureaucratic restrictions, is by allying with groups of sort of
Speaker 4: right wing de transitioners. And we're going to talk about
Speaker 4: that more after this AD break, because we unfortunately are
Speaker 4: reliant on ads to cover this stuff. So yeah, here's ads. Okay,
Speaker 4: we are back, and this is the point where we
Speaker 4: need to talk about the stuff in the Ohio story
Speaker 4: that is very weird. Now. I think if people have
Speaker 4: been following the story of sort of anti trans bills,
Speaker 4: one of the things that's been happening a lot is
Speaker 4: there's been this sort of there's there's a network of
Speaker 4: people who de transitioned for various reasons I don't know,
Speaker 4: who have become very very hardline right wingers who have
Speaker 4: basically been doing like circuits of of the capitals of
Speaker 4: you know, like state capitals and like going to Capitol
Speaker 4: Hill and like telling their quote unquote stories to try
Speaker 4: to get this to try to get like all trans
Speaker 4: healthcare bands. Now, so this is you know, this is
Speaker 4: something we've covered on the show in the past. What
Speaker 4: is very weird about Ohio is that you had a
Speaker 4: group of these right wing transitioners who specifically we're trying
Speaker 4: to get it looked like at very at least we're
Speaker 4: trying to get or trying to stop the like the
Speaker 4: actual uh like gender firming care ban from going through,
Speaker 4: and we're in favor of more of this restriction stuff.
Speaker 4: Is that is that?
Speaker 10: Is that?
Speaker 4: What am I getting this right?
Speaker 6: Not not exactly. There's a couple of.
Speaker 4: No, okay roles. Sorry, I'm I.
Speaker 8: I can provide my my brief description here real quick,
Speaker 8: and then you can retake aspects of that stuff. Because
Speaker 8: something to bear in mind is the fact that, like
Speaker 8: some of the opposition in the Ohio testimonies are actually
Speaker 8: coming from people who view themselves as very left wing.
Speaker 8: They are radical feminists. Specifically, they are just hardcore opposed.
Speaker 1: I mean, I would say they're they're they're actual politics
Speaker 1: for a reactionary even yea, they call themselves left wing.
Speaker 1: They see themselves as being opposed to the right, like
Speaker 1: that's how they present themselves, and they definitely believe that
Speaker 1: they're anti right wing.
Speaker 6: But there's there's also another component. This one is like.
Speaker 8: The nuances are sometimes almost impossible to be able to
Speaker 8: tease out. I swear tomato tomato. But one of the
Speaker 8: people who was a proponent for both this current bill
Speaker 8: and a past bill is actually Corona Cone, who doesn't
Speaker 8: not consider herself to be right wing, though she does
Speaker 8: appear to be working with a number of right wing people.
Speaker 8: She considers herself to be quote unquote libertarian. Now, this
Speaker 8: is a red flag for those of us who have
Speaker 8: done any sort of like real engagement with certain types
Speaker 8: of libertarians or political organizing or whatever in that if
Speaker 8: you actually pay attention to some of the arguments that
Speaker 8: are being made or the collaborations that are being made,
Speaker 8: you can generally tell which direction their politics are truly
Speaker 8: leaning towards right?
Speaker 6: Is it left wing? Is it right wing? And hers
Speaker 6: have been steering far and far more right wing.
Speaker 8: Like she uses the excuse of, you know, I want
Speaker 8: small government and stuff like that, but if you're working
Speaker 8: with like legislators to put in full on bands, I'm sorry, honey,
Speaker 8: that's not small government.
Speaker 6: That's not small government.
Speaker 8: That is the opposite of small government, truly, and so
Speaker 8: like like it's kind of hard to sort of like
Speaker 8: encapsulate the entirety of like the proponents of the opposition
Speaker 8: into particular political alignments, because a lot of it is
Speaker 8: really based off of like what are their motivations and
Speaker 8: who are they willing to work with?
Speaker 6: Which again, tomato tomato.
Speaker 8: But I'll have to come back to the Corona Cone
Speaker 8: one at some point here too, because that one is
Speaker 8: actually an important timeline in terms of understanding the Ohio bills.
Speaker 6: Mm hmm, yeah, I mean basically, I mean you have
Speaker 6: like these, You do have like right wing beast.
Speaker 1: Transition people like Chloe Cole or Christian Boseley, Laura Becker
Speaker 1: who like do you know they they'll be hanging out
Speaker 1: with like the Heritage Foundation or Billboard Chris or the
Speaker 1: Cue Shop yeah, or Our Duty like and they very
Speaker 1: much are just working to try to pass these full
Speaker 1: on bands.
Speaker 6: But then yeah, you have also these.
Speaker 1: Like d trans Turf and they're more liberal fellow travelers
Speaker 1: who definitely see themselves as being opposed to the right
Speaker 1: and are opposed to I mean, they they're opposed to
Speaker 1: the right because they see right wing Christians as being
Speaker 1: a threat to them as well, and are at least
Speaker 1: smart enough to understand that if you know, right wing
Speaker 1: Christians have their way, they're going to suffer too.
Speaker 6: But they also want to end trans healthcare or restrict it.
Speaker 6: I mean some of the.
Speaker 1: Two of the people who helped organize, helped collect the testimony,
Speaker 1: the group statement that was submitted under the name Are
Speaker 1: you asking why Max and Katie Robinson they have ties
Speaker 1: to Janice Raymond? Dead serious, Yeah they do. Janie Raymond
Speaker 1: help publish Max Robinson's book It over at Spinefects Press,
Speaker 1: this swurf and turf publisher.
Speaker 6: So yeah, they they're not actually a pro.
Speaker 4: Trans like, yeah, well we should we should, so Janice
Speaker 4: Raymond for people who, uh, someone we've we've talked about
Speaker 4: on the show a few times. But Jennie Raymond wrote
Speaker 4: a book called The Transsexual Empire, and okay, so people
Speaker 4: normally leave off the subtitle of it, which is called
Speaker 4: It's the Transsexual Empire. The Making of the she mail.
Speaker 4: It's like one of the original like original anti trans people,
Speaker 4: like incredibly violent transfo like like both both in terms
Speaker 4: of like the career of her work, like physically like
Speaker 4: violently anti trans and yeah, yeah she is. She is
Speaker 4: connected to a lot of the modern anti trans groups
Speaker 4: and also the modern like the modern I don't know
Speaker 4: what you call them, people who are attempting to take
Speaker 4: away trans healthcare but who don't see themselves as anti trans.
Speaker 6: I have no idea how to even summarize that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, bad, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I kind of yes, yeah, yeah, so like I mean yeah,
Speaker 1: and I mean yeah, Max and Kitty fully endorse Janice
Speaker 1: Raymond's theories.
Speaker 6: I mean Janice Raymond.
Speaker 1: One of the things she's famous for is saying that like,
Speaker 1: like transsexualism should be morally mandate out of existence, like
Speaker 1: Max Robinson has said that she supports that. They also
Speaker 1: both I mean Janice Raymond focused heavily on transom and overall,
Speaker 1: and you know, also claim that basically like trans women were,
Speaker 1: you know, committing sexual assault against women just for existing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Max and Kitty are also horrible transpasogenists to actually make
Speaker 1: I mean, Kitty makes a lot of propaganda tracking attacking
Speaker 1: transomen and trying to cast all trans women as predators
Speaker 1: and yeah, just not people you want on your side,
Speaker 1: because they're not. They're danger to all trans people. They're
Speaker 1: just like trying to find a way to influence trans
Speaker 1: healthcare in a different way. And I mean, I I'm
Speaker 1: concerned that people will hear like, oh, look at all
Speaker 1: these deeds, like these supposedly trans friendly d trans people
Speaker 1: who testified against the SPAN, not realizing that these are
Speaker 1: actually like purse with an agenda.
Speaker 6: Who I mean part of them.
Speaker 1: Part of what they want to do is to infiltrate
Speaker 1: like queer and trans subcultures and promo like profideology and
Speaker 1: recruit people like let's put it this way.
Speaker 8: So Max Robinson in terms of some of her beliefs
Speaker 8: refers to medical transition for like trans masculine folks as
Speaker 8: a sato ritual, going back to Mary daily types of
Speaker 8: descriptions of things. And then Kitty was one of the
Speaker 8: people that was interviewed for and gave extensive background information
Speaker 8: for a BBC article that was released. I believe it
Speaker 8: was called something along the lines of we are being
Speaker 8: pressured into sex by some trans women, which is basically yes,
Speaker 8: that one right, Like so yeah, being into this narrative
Speaker 8: that trans women are sexual predators right into the British
Speaker 8: media when they were already having a massive influx of
Speaker 8: anti trans media that was again feeding into the demonization
Speaker 8: of trans people as a whole, but then also like
Speaker 8: controlling trans youth and the likes. And of course this
Speaker 8: article not only did it end up originally platforming like
Speaker 8: an actual like serial rape.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Lily kaid like someone someone a serial rapist so
Speaker 4: prolific that like, within like maybe thirty minutes of this
Speaker 4: article going up, like multiple like probably like a dozen
Speaker 4: people had come forward and been like she raped me,
Speaker 4: Like that is the person that the BBC was like
Speaker 4: coming forward to do this shit with.
Speaker 8: Yeah, she ended up posting basically a manifesto on her
Speaker 8: website that was even more extreme than aspects of the
Speaker 8: article showed off. And then I will also note that
Speaker 8: this article was originally I believe it was only translated
Speaker 8: into Portuguese in order to be oh yeah, moved into
Speaker 8: BBC still zilla yeah yeah, which is also one of
Speaker 8: the countries that has one of the highest rates of
Speaker 8: trans femicide. So like, yeah, these these are the people
Speaker 8: that decided to go ahead and testify. Yeah, Like, well,
Speaker 8: I'm those of personally bring up Max and Kitty because
Speaker 8: like they were some of the people who helped like
Speaker 8: get the testimonies. Like I found a post on Kitty's
Speaker 8: Tumblr blog looking for d trans and Desisted women who
Speaker 8: were willing to testify against a ban, and then Max
Speaker 8: was the one who actually submitted the collective statement from
Speaker 8: Arius and Wise. He also submitted an individual statement to
Speaker 8: So basically like they found a bunch of like de
Speaker 8: trans and desisted turfs on Tumblr to sign a statement
Speaker 8: and then submit to like the state of Ohio, which is.
Speaker 6: Kind of wild to think about.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you don't normally expect to see testimony from turf Tumblr,
Speaker 8: let alone transfer Tumblr.
Speaker 6: But that is, like that really happened. Yeah, really, who
Speaker 6: you want to show up for you?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 4: Really really not good in terms of who you want
Speaker 4: doing your legislation, Like oh god, yeah yeah. So okay,
Speaker 4: we need to take another ad break and then we
Speaker 4: will come back and talk more about this. So enjoy
Speaker 4: your brief capitalistic respite from the horror of capitalism.
Speaker 3: We are back.
Speaker 8: In order to properly understand the situation in Ohio, you
Speaker 8: kind of have to go back several years, right. One
Speaker 8: of the bills that ended up being proposed in twenty
Speaker 8: twenty was HB five to one three. This was another
Speaker 8: version of a proposed ban on gender firming care for
Speaker 8: trans youth in particular, and it was sponsored by Representatives
Speaker 8: Ron Hood and Bill Dean. This one is interesting because
Speaker 8: one of the groups that ended up coming out in
Speaker 8: opposition to it was the Gendercare Consumer Advocacy Network. This
Speaker 8: is the organization that I helped found in twenty nineteen
Speaker 8: prior to my resignation. They submitted this opposition after my resignation,
Speaker 8: but it is available on archives. Then in twenty twenty
Speaker 8: one and the twenty twenty two legislative session, there was
Speaker 8: the proposal for HP four or five four, which was
Speaker 8: another proposed ban on gender for main care for trans youth.
Speaker 8: This time it was being sponsored by Representative Gary Klick,
Speaker 8: who was also the sponsor of the current bill that
Speaker 8: had recently been vetoed. And then the V two vtwed
Speaker 8: And in May of twenty twenty two, the Gendercare Consumer
Speaker 8: Advocacy Network or GCCAM testified in tentative support. The testimony
Speaker 8: was submitted by coronicone and included suggestions for amendments. These
Speaker 8: amendments are actually very important. One of the amendments that
Speaker 8: she recommended was on data tracking. I believe it says
Speaker 8: here the second amendment would be a requirement for physicians
Speaker 8: mental health care providers and other medical healthcare professionals, mandating
Speaker 8: an annual report to the Ohio Department of Health the number,
Speaker 8: age and sex of minor patients who are receiving gender
Speaker 8: transition services of any type. This was what she originally
Speaker 8: proposed as an amendment to the bill. The bill again
Speaker 8: did not end up passing. But now we are seeing
Speaker 8: HB sixty eight, which is the one that merges the
Speaker 8: ban on gender firming care for trans youth and a
Speaker 8: sports ban because I guess, you know, trans youth plane
Speaker 8: chess is somehow like threatening. So this one was again
Speaker 8: represented like sponsored by Representative Click, and this time, curiously enough,
Speaker 8: Karina had been working more extensively with Click during various
Speaker 8: portions of the.
Speaker 6: Of the push for the bill. Right you know, she testified.
Speaker 8: Multiple times she's posted videos with him, pictures, et cetera.
Speaker 8: Another person who had originally founded the organization, Carrie Callahan,
Speaker 8: did originally start opposing. Curiously, she did not note her
Speaker 8: prior experience with the organization, but she did start to
Speaker 8: oppose the bill and then later starts to put out
Speaker 8: basically like a more.
Speaker 6: General call for opposition to HB sixty eight.
Speaker 8: Right you know, trying to collect in you know, various
Speaker 8: types of detransitioned people who were opposed to bands on
Speaker 8: gender affirming care right.
Speaker 6: And then who is it that ends up showing up.
Speaker 6: It's this weird little like.
Speaker 8: Turf group that originally came out of the trans Turf
Speaker 8: Tumbler in twenty thirteen, that historically speaking, she had prior
Speaker 8: working relationships with and even presented their stories to us path.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and also I mean Max Robinson too, like both her,
Speaker 1: both Max Robinson and Carrie Callahan were both featured in
Speaker 1: Jesse Single's Atlantic article too. There's lots of points of connection.
Speaker 1: They've they've known each other since at least twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: and you know, work together.
Speaker 8: Like I can't say for certain how it is that
Speaker 8: they ended up there personally, to me, it seems a
Speaker 8: little weird that people who had prior working relationships dating
Speaker 8: back a decade are showing up in the same place again,
Speaker 8: and like they are also showing up in legislative testimony
Speaker 8: for the first time in the state where some like
Speaker 8: one of the central figures for a long time there
Speaker 8: is putting out a call to oppose this particular bill.
Speaker 8: Like the coincidences are racking up a little bit here,
Speaker 8: it might be good to ask some further questions about
Speaker 8: what exactly happened, because I have some questions. So you know,
Speaker 8: this happened in December of twenty twenty three.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 8: Eventually Governor Dwine goes ahead and vetos, but at the
Speaker 8: same time he makes his you know, proposal for the
Speaker 8: drafting of new regulations with you know, the Department of
Speaker 8: Health and the likes and within that is the suggestion
Speaker 8: of detailed data tracking that is reported to the Department
Speaker 8: of Health and then to the general public every six months,
Speaker 8: focusing on things like, you know, I don't think that
Speaker 8: he wanted to focus on like the number of people
Speaker 8: that were doing it, but he did include a like
Speaker 8: the nature of the diagnosis. It applies to all ages.
Speaker 8: It was not originally restricted to trans youth, like the
Speaker 8: original testimony was from from gc CAN. The time range
Speaker 8: was also ended up being like it's shortened. He wants
Speaker 8: it every six months, not every year. But you know,
Speaker 8: very similar kinds of things, right in terms of what
Speaker 8: it is that he is proposing for this mass collection
Speaker 8: of data. And a previous testimony was submitted to the
Speaker 8: Ohio Legislature in fact, Like, not long after that fact,
Speaker 8: representative clique ended up going on an interview with Tony
Speaker 8: Perkins of Family Research Council talking about the pending veto.
Speaker 8: They originally did this interview on January ninth, and he
Speaker 8: noted that the data collection suggestion was originally included in
Speaker 8: a draft version of his bill, but was removed due
Speaker 8: to opposition, and so he's glad actually that that was included,
Speaker 8: although he wished that there would be even more restrictions.
Speaker 8: He actually was going to encourage the governor to also
Speaker 8: sign an executive order banning the use of puberty blockers,
Speaker 8: not just surgery. As far as I can tell, that
Speaker 8: has not happened, but he did say that he was
Speaker 8: going to try.
Speaker 6: But like.
Speaker 8: It's like there's there's definitely some weird kind of like
Speaker 8: escalations that end up happening, and some of the like
Speaker 8: some of the interconnecting threads with individuals that again just
Speaker 8: happened to keep showing up in the same place over
Speaker 8: and over and over again, either in support or in opposition.
Speaker 8: Some folks have been consistently opposed, whereas other people have
Speaker 8: been kind of flip flopping. The GCCN organization is one
Speaker 8: of the ones that flip flopped. It originally opposed all bands,
Speaker 8: and then now all of a sudden, it's like, you know,
Speaker 8: the person that they are throwing out into these testimonies
Speaker 8: was arguing in favor of them, and then like you
Speaker 8: know the quote unquote are you asking why collective? And
Speaker 8: to be fair, Carrie Callahan have also been firmly opposed
Speaker 8: to full on bands and the Christian right pretty much
Speaker 8: from the beginning, though for very very very different reasons.
Speaker 1: I mean, some other opposition was, well, people will go
Speaker 1: to like could go to other states where there's less restrictions,
Speaker 1: Like no, the stuff we have you know, hiwas already
Speaker 1: like has a lot of restrictions, and majority of trans
Speaker 1: youth like only get counseling and they don't get any
Speaker 1: like none of them get surgery, and most of them,
Speaker 1: like only a very small number of them get puberty
Speaker 1: blockers or horrormones. So this should be like this should
Speaker 1: be an example for the entire country. Like that was
Speaker 1: kind of Carrie Gallahan's take on things. And then like,
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, a lot of the the more like
Speaker 1: the d transferfs, like the Robinson's or other members of
Speaker 1: our Usking Wives it's like, Okay, well they're opposed to
Speaker 1: the Christian Right, and they recognize that, like if the
Speaker 1: Christian Right gains more power and is banning things, that's
Speaker 1: bad not just for trans people, but also for you know, cis,
Speaker 1: lesbian and gay people and says women, and you know
Speaker 1: it will end up hurting them too. So I mean,
Speaker 1: even from a self preservation stance, they understand like why
Speaker 1: they should be opposed to the Christian Right, but they're
Speaker 1: still if you actually read their testimony, a lot of
Speaker 1: them do make it clear that they're opposed to transition.
Speaker 1: Like one one person called it like compared medical like
Speaker 1: trans healthcare to like a hydra said that, like it
Speaker 1: would only be cutting off ahead like these aren't.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and so a lot of them were, you know, we're.
Speaker 1: Also kind of praising uh, you know, regulations like the
Speaker 1: group uh statement talks about like it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: shutting down clinics when improve anyone's quality of care. Ohio's
Speaker 1: existing programs are known for their moderation. Uh, they don't
Speaker 1: perform surgery on minors. Many clinics out of state do
Speaker 1: a lota YadA.
Speaker 8: So Max Robinson's testimony also said similar but that she
Speaker 8: had it on good word from an Ohio in.
Speaker 1: Right, I have yes, you had say I hear if
Speaker 1: I'm good authority from an Ohio in that pediatric gender
Speaker 1: clinics their prescribed hormones pretty sparingly and don't actually perform
Speaker 1: any underaged transition surgeries.
Speaker 6: Other states do, though, So there's like.
Speaker 1: This whole thing is like like there's still kind of
Speaker 1: scaremongers like, oh, but these other states, like we're transition
Speaker 1: as a minor, those are bad, but they're still making
Speaker 1: it clear that the idea that people having easy access
Speaker 1: to transition, especially as youth, is like a.
Speaker 6: Bad thing in their minds.
Speaker 1: I don't think we actually mentioned like how like if
Speaker 1: you actually look at the collective statement, that are you
Speaker 1: asking why issued?
Speaker 6: And like who signed it?
Speaker 1: Like a whole bunch of them didn't actually transition, Like
Speaker 1: a lot of them are actually desisted, which means that
Speaker 1: they like never actually medically transition. They considered transitioning or
Speaker 1: maybe socially transitioned, but then they decided not to medically transition,
Speaker 1: possibly after you know, converting to anti transfeminism or the like.
Speaker 1: So it's just a bunch of people who like I
Speaker 1: decided not to transition. I'm desisted, like you know, testifying
Speaker 1: against a healthcare band. That's also like a kind of
Speaker 1: a classic strategy too. It is like they have a
Speaker 1: bunch of like dissisted people along mixed in with people
Speaker 1: who actually like transition and do transition to kind of
Speaker 1: like inflate the numbers.
Speaker 6: Yeah, this is a standard. Yeah, this is very standard.
Speaker 6: It's an old trick.
Speaker 1: It's it's like, oh yeah, you're like okay, yeah, And
Speaker 1: then a bunch of them are also like saying the
Speaker 1: ones who did like you know, transition and new transition,
Speaker 1: they're like emphasizing how they a few of them like
Speaker 1: are emphasizing how young they were when they transitioned and
Speaker 1: be transitioned.
Speaker 6: Again, not exactly, yeah, not exactly. Protraums.
Speaker 8: This collective here with like pretty pretty explicit turf ties,
Speaker 8: including some of them directly to Trannis. Raymond herself was
Speaker 8: the bulk of the opposition from de transitioned people to
Speaker 8: the bill. I should note, like that's fifteen signatures right there.
Speaker 8: People are talking about like how there were nineteen people
Speaker 8: that were opposed, so fifteen of them were either like
Speaker 8: part of the recruitment or actively recruited on d trans
Speaker 8: turfed her.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then like at least five of them are
Speaker 1: just assisted, they're not to transitioned. It's not clear about everyone,
Speaker 1: but yeah, yeah, it's.
Speaker 6: It's weird.
Speaker 7: It's just.
Speaker 6: It's really weird.
Speaker 8: And it's also been really weird to see the media
Speaker 8: just kind of take that testimony of theirs at face value.
Speaker 6: That it's been a problem for a long time.
Speaker 1: It is like getting the media to actually sort of
Speaker 1: like investigate or care about people's like political views or
Speaker 1: activism or actually kind of being like like sometimes like
Speaker 1: I think, like I say, like the Basilon New York
Speaker 1: Times story we were talking about before has Grace Litnski Smith,
Speaker 1: and they're.
Speaker 6: Without saying that she was you know, affiliated with J. C.
Speaker 6: Kan and she's like not just with the president, she
Speaker 6: was the president.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it's like it's like, okay, she's just like
Speaker 1: represented as just like you know, as a deutns woman
Speaker 1: without going into like she she's the head of this
Speaker 1: political organization, and that's just you know, this has happened,
Speaker 1: this has been a problem for years.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So it's just like, I mean, just a whole lot
Speaker 1: of different sketchy characters kind of came out for what's
Speaker 1: going on in Ohio. I mean you have like you know,
Speaker 1: Republicans and right wing Christians who just want to straight
Speaker 1: up ban transition and move towards eliminating it for for
Speaker 1: all trans people and workers, making it you know, as
Speaker 1: impossible for trans people to live in society as they can.
Speaker 1: And then you have kind of more like tricky Republicans
Speaker 1: like DeWine sort of like pretending to find some kind
Speaker 1: of compromise and be like, oh, we're just trying to
Speaker 1: work for like more comprehensive healthcare that is just so
Speaker 1: everyone gets what they need, and like sort of like
Speaker 1: using some of the language that was used by clinicians
Speaker 1: who are trying to fight against the and their testimony
Speaker 1: and you know, trying to claim make these claims, but
Speaker 1: if we actually look at the details, like the regulations
Speaker 1: they're proposing would make it nearly impossible for anyone to transition,
Speaker 1: you know, both youth and adults. And then you have
Speaker 1: like you know, these different medical professionals and kind of
Speaker 1: more liberal transphobic d trans people who want more gatekeeping
Speaker 1: and regulation and control over trans people and are kind
Speaker 1: of like using de transition and transition regret as a
Speaker 1: justification for that or praising being like, oh well, Ohio,
Speaker 1: their youth clinics are already really good because they're very
Speaker 1: cautious and they use therapy a lot more than they
Speaker 1: actually allow youth to medically transition.
Speaker 6: I mean, that argument didn't seem to work out at all.
Speaker 1: Instead, it sounds like the governor kind of was like, oh,
Speaker 1: two thirds of youth only get therapy instead of medical transition,
Speaker 1: and we should do that for everyone.
Speaker 6: It's like sort of like, you know.
Speaker 1: If you propose restrictions, say oh, this is great, then
Speaker 1: of course the people who are more extreme will just
Speaker 1: like take that and run with it.
Speaker 6: And then you know you have uh, you know, d
Speaker 6: trans turfs showing up and testifying for their own weird reasons.
Speaker 1: You know, probably because of their connections to carry Galahan,
Speaker 1: but you know, this also is a chance for them
Speaker 1: to sort of like you know, launder their image, make
Speaker 1: it seem like, oh, look we're good, we're good d
Speaker 1: trans people.
Speaker 6: We oppose the religious right, we're fighting against these bands.
Speaker 1: And then people who don't necessarily like know any better
Speaker 1: will like come here maybe right right, because this is
Speaker 1: like that's a strategy they often pretend to be more
Speaker 1: trans friendly than they really are to sort of like
Speaker 1: draw people in or be able to like influence queer
Speaker 1: and trans communities and slowly slip in like crypto turf
Speaker 1: ideology and recruit people or just space.
Speaker 6: Yeah. So, I mean it's like there's just a whole
Speaker 6: lot of.
Speaker 1: Different you know, anti trans groups and individuals like stretching
Speaker 1: from like paternalistic medical professionals who want more gaykeeping, who
Speaker 1: want to restrict the number of people transitioning like all
Speaker 1: the way to you know, like Christian nationalists you want
Speaker 1: to just.
Speaker 6: You know wipe us out completely.
Speaker 1: And you know, not only h you know, are basically
Speaker 1: at war with bodily autonomy in general.
Speaker 6: They don't want anyway.
Speaker 1: They want to be the ones to control what people
Speaker 1: do with their bodies. Like they also want to you know,
Speaker 1: restrict reproductive care and abortion. It's all part of the
Speaker 1: same war, uh, just control people and assort their version
Speaker 1: of authoritary in Christianity. And then you have you know, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, weird d trans turfs, and it's just like
Speaker 1: all you kind of have to like understand like all
Speaker 1: these different factions and how they sort of like interact
Speaker 1: together and how you know, they try to.
Speaker 6: Use each other, you know, can see them overwhelming.
Speaker 1: But like the more we kind of understand like what
Speaker 1: we're up against, like the easier it is for us
Speaker 1: to develop strategies of resistance. And it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: even though you know it can seem like we're up
Speaker 1: against a lot of different groups, but like, you know,
Speaker 1: we're also part of this larger fight for liberation, and
Speaker 1: you know, we can connect you know with feminists who
Speaker 1: are fighting for reproductive autonomy. We can connect with like
Speaker 1: disability liberation activists who are fighting for better healthcare for everyone.
Speaker 6: We do potentially have lots of allies.
Speaker 1: We do have lots of connections like with other movements,
Speaker 1: and so when you think of it that way, it's like, Okay,
Speaker 1: we're not just like.
Speaker 6: One small group up against this whole like Goliath.
Speaker 1: Let's like, no, we're part of this larger movement that
Speaker 1: is fighting so that everyone is free and that everyone
Speaker 1: gets the health care they deserve.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I mean I think that one of the
Speaker 4: one of the sort of tangential things here too is
Speaker 4: you know, this is an extremely negative example of the
Speaker 4: amount of influence that a very very small number of
Speaker 4: people can wield who have extremely popular ideologies. On the
Speaker 4: other hand, there are a lot of us and the
Speaker 4: things that we believe are very popular. And you know,
Speaker 4: the amount of power that we can wield if we
Speaker 4: are willing to organize, and we are when we understand
Speaker 4: what we're organizing against is immense, and it is enough
Speaker 4: to drive these people into the fucking ground. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: welcome to dig it up in here. This is Mia
Speaker 4: long back with part two of my interview with Kay
Speaker 4: and Lee from Health Liberation Now about the long origins
Speaker 4: of anti trans legislation and policy in Ohio. Let's get
Speaker 4: right into it, Okay. So the next thing I wanted
Speaker 4: to sort of ask about is, so this is a
Speaker 4: very very long running I guess, sort of strategy and
Speaker 4: campaign of sort of right wing or right wing and
Speaker 4: turf do transition like groups advocating for trans healthcare bands.
Speaker 4: And I wanted to I wanted to talk about some
Speaker 4: of the older campaigns that happened, and I wanted to
Speaker 4: talk about specifically some of the campaigns to influence WPATH.
Speaker 4: Oh boy, right, right, So we should we should start
Speaker 4: by explaining to people what WPATH is, because I think
Speaker 4: unless you're trans you probably don't know. You've probably never
Speaker 4: heard of WPATH.
Speaker 1: It's like World Professional Association for trans Healthcare, I believe,
Speaker 1: is what it.
Speaker 6: Can double check that.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, World Professional Associations for Transvender Health formerly known as
Speaker 1: the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Alliance.
Speaker 8: They published the standard care that is usually used to
Speaker 8: help inform gender firming care for trans people, and they
Speaker 8: have done various versions of.
Speaker 6: This over the course of decades. We are currently on
Speaker 6: version eight.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and historically they've they're a way of administering trans
Speaker 1: healthcare has involved a lot of like gatekeeping and then
Speaker 1: psychological assessments or requiring people to do a real life test,
Speaker 1: which is like making someone live as the gender they're
Speaker 1: transitioning to for like a year before they can actually
Speaker 1: access medical transition. So I guess like social transition, but
Speaker 1: it's like a test to prove whether you're a quote
Speaker 1: unquote real trans person or not. And like things of Yeah,
Speaker 1: things have gotten like somewhat better over time, but there's
Speaker 1: still a lot of medical professionals in and especially like
Speaker 1: therapists in WPATH who like still want to require some
Speaker 1: form of gatekeeping, who basically still don't trust trans people
Speaker 1: to know, you know, who we are and what we
Speaker 1: need and are like okay, but we need to make
Speaker 1: sure they get therapy. We need to make sure we
Speaker 1: do like oh the SYPE tests, what if they regret it?
Speaker 3: And so yeah.
Speaker 1: So I used to be a de transition radical feminist
Speaker 1: back in the day, and I used to know I
Speaker 1: mean I knew Max and Kitty. I was involved in
Speaker 1: that particular group for about like six and a half
Speaker 1: seven years, and I used to have a blog called
Speaker 1: Crash Chaos Cats where I wrote about de transitioning and
Speaker 1: kind of got more more turphy over time. But like
Speaker 1: pretty early into my blog, about like three months or
Speaker 1: so in this gender therapist who worked for the San
Speaker 1: Francisco Department of Health like left a comment on my
Speaker 1: blog and was like, I'm interested in talking to de
Speaker 1: transitioned people because I think there are two Like well,
Speaker 1: she left to comment that she was interested in talking
Speaker 1: to de transition people and you know, talking to me,
Speaker 1: and then like we started emailing back and forth, and
Speaker 1: she opened up pretty quickly and said like there are
Speaker 1: too many f to ms in San Francisco. It was
Speaker 1: like too many f to ms in the San Francisco
Speaker 1: Bay Area, there are too many like you know, Quoe
Speaker 1: unquote female PEP transitioning. I know, it's like, oh no,
Speaker 1: it's like, oh wow, there's It's like it couldn't possibly
Speaker 1: be that people are just coming to one of the
Speaker 1: most trans friendly areas in the country to transition because
Speaker 1: they think they'll have an easier time there.
Speaker 6: No, there's got to be too many people.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think somewhere early in the conversation she
Speaker 1: brought up YouTube influencing people towards transitioning.
Speaker 6: She thought there was like, you know, pressure to transition
Speaker 6: in the trans community.
Speaker 1: So anyways, shit all this stuff, something about like you know, oh,
Speaker 1: people are treating this social problem as a medical problem.
Speaker 1: And I you know, immediately kind of turned around and
Speaker 1: started talking with this other detrans radical feminist that I knew,
Speaker 1: divoras Ahab, and we started scheming like, Okay, this like
Speaker 1: gender therapist who works for the San Francisco Department of
Speaker 1: Health like thinks there's too many people transitioning. How do
Speaker 1: we exploit this, Like how can we like use this
Speaker 1: as an opportunity to like cut down on the number
Speaker 1: of like people transitioning.
Speaker 6: It wasn't just the connection to the Department of Health. Yeah,
Speaker 6: also the w PATH.
Speaker 1: Well that that we found out about that I was
Speaker 1: just going to go into that, like eventually, first we
Speaker 1: found out she was working for the Department of Public Health,
Speaker 1: and then we found out that she was in w
Speaker 1: PATH and she actually was like you know, talking to
Speaker 1: the president of w PATH and that she like so
Speaker 1: she made it clear that like she wanted to use
Speaker 1: the stories of de transitioned people to try to get
Speaker 1: more clinicians to be to take a more cautious approach,
Speaker 1: and she also wanted to try to develop psych assessments
Speaker 1: that could supposedly like weed out you know, who the
Speaker 1: real trans people were, who was going to benefit from
Speaker 1: transitioning and who would supposed to go on to regret
Speaker 1: transitioning and d transition.
Speaker 6: The thing is, we didn't actually.
Speaker 1: Believe that you could tell the difference between someone who
Speaker 1: would end up like state transitions because we were TERFs, right,
Speaker 1: we thought everyone could you know, be saved by radical
Speaker 1: feminism like we And we had a bunch of people
Speaker 1: in our group who thought that they were you know,
Speaker 1: quote unquote true transsexuals, who thought they fit the criteria
Speaker 1: of someone who would have a seccess full transition, you know,
Speaker 1: until they you know, decided they actually were suffering from
Speaker 1: internalized misogyny or some other kind of rad fem explanation
Speaker 1: for gender dysphoria. And like the thing is, like Devora
Speaker 1: also lived in the San Francisco Bay area, so you
Speaker 1: actually end up like meeting up with this gender therapist.
Speaker 1: His name was Julie Graham, and was like pretty open
Speaker 1: with her with her anti trans views. I mean, she
Speaker 1: wasn't like completely open with her like intentions like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm going to use this person to try to like
Speaker 1: work towards ending all transition, but she was. She did
Speaker 1: tell you know, Graham, but she didn't think anyone really
Speaker 1: benefited from it. And she told her that, you know,
Speaker 1: she said she knew people who have been true transsexuals
Speaker 1: who had de transitioned, and said like lots of really
Speaker 1: awful things about like trans women being fetishists and just
Speaker 1: like you know, all this very anti trans stuff. But
Speaker 1: then you know, I say, oh, but I think we
Speaker 1: don't have to agree on everything. I think we can
Speaker 1: like work together, and like, you know, this gender therapist
Speaker 1: fell for it, like somehow like divorcing all this very
Speaker 1: anti trans stuff like making a close she was opposed
Speaker 1: to transition, saying like really nasty, trans misogynistic shit, like
Speaker 1: none of that was like objectionable enough for great not
Speaker 1: to like continue to like work with her, to continue
Speaker 1: to be like, hey, do you want to talk to
Speaker 1: these clinicians about what it is to do transition?
Speaker 6: And you know eventually what happened like that.
Speaker 1: Eventually, this relationship with this gender therapist eventually led to
Speaker 1: a presentation at the first us PATH conference by Carrie Callahan,
Speaker 1: who's like she's kind of an odd figure because she
Speaker 1: never actually identified as like a radical feminist, but she
Speaker 1: spent like years hanging out was like detransitioned radical feminists,
Speaker 1: and she's she's de transitioned, but she's kind of more
Speaker 1: of like a weird liberal who believes in more gatekeeping,
Speaker 1: but she's kind of handy, like we like like she
Speaker 1: did this presentation at us PATH and she showed some
Speaker 1: videos of trans turfs, including myself, like I made one
Speaker 1: of I made a short video, and Max Robinson also
Speaker 1: made one of those videos, and Carrie Stella was the
Speaker 1: third person, and Carry Stella she did like she was
Speaker 1: another like d trans tumbler turf who did this survey.
Speaker 1: It still gets like it was a it was a
Speaker 1: survey monkey survey. It's gets cited by like anti trans
Speaker 1: researchers about de transition yeap. Which anyways, so we so
Speaker 1: there were three of us who made these short videos,
Speaker 1: both me and Max Robinson by that point had gone
Speaker 1: like we had hooked up with these weird turfs who
Speaker 1: were Dianic witches and taken part in these kind of
Speaker 1: weird neopagan x trans reclaiming femaleness rituals. We had been
Speaker 1: through this kind of like religious neo pagan like you know,
Speaker 1: conversion practice rituals, which of course that wasn't something that
Speaker 1: the USP like those are the people, you know, dos
Speaker 1: Path knew that, but we hit that. We just you know,
Speaker 1: I talked about how I thought I had transition due
Speaker 1: to like internalized misogyny and trauma on all that. So
Speaker 1: I was sort of like spreading a more like kind
Speaker 1: of watered down terf ideology to the folks over at
Speaker 1: us Path.
Speaker 8: This is this is kind of an intentional strategy if
Speaker 8: you think about it, because I want to I want
Speaker 8: to point out something from the emails about how that
Speaker 8: presentation was made and then given where Carrie Callahan noted
Speaker 8: that her slides were quote unquote decidedly on radical.
Speaker 6: She was trying to talk to therapists as a therapist.
Speaker 8: What that basically meant was she was taking away a
Speaker 8: lot of the more objectionable elements, the things that would
Speaker 8: identify folks like Kai and her previously scrambled state as
Speaker 8: a turf and being completely oppos transition and stuff like that,
Speaker 8: and then putting on you know, kind of suiting them
Speaker 8: up right, like you know, getting getting them in their
Speaker 8: in their nice clothes, and then presenting them to a
Speaker 8: professional audience who is then able to take that information
Speaker 8: and sort of absorb it into their general thinking and
Speaker 8: then how that's going to play out in terms of
Speaker 8: their changes or implementations of care in the long term.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that's something that like, I think there's something
Speaker 4: that's pretty common with like a d D trends, uh,
Speaker 4: like anti transactivists across the spectrum, Like a lot of
Speaker 4: people like Cloe Cold, there's a lot of the sort
Speaker 4: of like just hardline right wingers who didn't talk about
Speaker 4: stuff like like like some of these people de transition
Speaker 4: because like the thing that they're saying now is the
Speaker 4: de transition because they got a vision from God, right,
Speaker 4: and they don't start with that because I think, right,
Speaker 4: I mean, I I think I think there should be
Speaker 4: more skepticism of people who are like I got a
Speaker 4: vision from the Christian God or like the Abrahamic God
Speaker 4: that told me a t transition. I think thered be
Speaker 4: borced get the system of that. But that's not something
Speaker 4: that like, I don't know if if you if you
Speaker 4: walk into like W Path and you tell them I
Speaker 4: was given to vision from God, They're going to be like,
Speaker 4: what whereas this kind of stuff?
Speaker 8: Right?
Speaker 4: Like, you know, but the Wpath people like and this
Speaker 4: is something that's kind of complicated about this because I
Speaker 4: think there's I think there's a lot of people who
Speaker 4: see W Path as one of the sort of like
Speaker 4: as one of the organizations that's there to protect trans
Speaker 4: people and that are sort of allies in this sort
Speaker 4: of in this battle against anti trands stuff. And it's
Speaker 4: true to a certain extent, but they're also like, this
Speaker 4: is an organization composed of a bunch of CIS doctors, right,
Speaker 4: who can be influenced and manipulated.
Speaker 8: And there's there's trans members as well, there's a few,
Speaker 8: but it also is less power.
Speaker 1: Well, it also seems like the trans people who do
Speaker 1: end up like you know, positioned at wpath like also
Speaker 1: tend to be like end up believing in gatekeeping and
Speaker 1: restrictions that kind of like internalize the general mindset and
Speaker 1: so so it's kind of like their tokens, right. It's
Speaker 1: kind of handy for like CIS medical professionals who want
Speaker 1: to like control trans people to have some trans people
Speaker 1: as like figureheads, you know, expressing those views because they're like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: you know, look this person's saying it and they're trans,
Speaker 1: so like yeah, I mean, I mean, like yeah, at
Speaker 1: the same like that the first US Path, I mean,
Speaker 1: just to kind of show how far things still need
Speaker 1: to come, you know, the same US Path where Carrie
Speaker 1: did her de transition presentation. Ken Zucker was there and
Speaker 1: he got he got protested, I mean like there was
Speaker 1: a protest against him, and I did. I believe they
Speaker 1: ended up like canceling at least like one of his presentations.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so ken Zucker kind of the notorious like
Speaker 1: conversion therapist to focus primarily on on trans use like
Speaker 1: clinic in Canada, you know people I mean and like
Speaker 1: going after both like trans youth and gender non conforming youth.
Speaker 1: They tried to like you know, prevent kids from growing
Speaker 1: up trans, but they also tried to make you know,
Speaker 1: non conforming youth like more gender conforming as well, with
Speaker 1: the justification, Oh well, it's easier to change individual than
Speaker 1: to like make society less bigoted. Yeah, yeah, but yeah,
Speaker 1: but he was the type of people, like he was
Speaker 1: one of the medical professionals that was like, you know,
Speaker 1: helping to create like the standards of care for for
Speaker 1: trans youth for decades, and it took a lot of
Speaker 1: work to.
Speaker 6: To change that.
Speaker 1: And like, yeah, he was still given a platform by
Speaker 1: w Path in like twenty seventeen.
Speaker 6: That's not that long ago.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And that's I don't know, it's this is one
Speaker 4: of these things where like the history of cist doctors
Speaker 4: treating trans people is really really bleak in ways that
Speaker 4: don't get talked about. And the reason, like one of
Speaker 4: the reasons they don't get talked about from people who
Speaker 4: know about it is that like it's fucking bad, Like
Speaker 4: it's a lot it's it's a lot of people getting raped.
Speaker 4: It's like a lot of like I mean, and like
Speaker 4: when we talked about sort of like gatekeeping for health care,
Speaker 4: Like that was the like one of the original things
Speaker 4: was like, you know, one of the things that would
Speaker 4: happen very very commonly was you know, it's like okay,
Speaker 4: like if you if you want to get healthcare, like
Speaker 4: you have to let me rape you like that. That's
Speaker 4: the thing that happened all the fucking time. And this
Speaker 4: is the and that's not something that's you know, extremely
Speaker 4: long ago, right, And you can you can look at
Speaker 4: like modern w path and be like, well, it's obviously
Speaker 4: like yes, it has come a long way from that shit,
Speaker 4: but simultaneously, yeah, like I don't know, that's that's something
Speaker 4: that you know, like there are living people who fucking
Speaker 4: experience that, right, and you know, and and when when
Speaker 4: you when you look at why these kinds of like
Speaker 4: d trans campaigns, why why these just like like these
Speaker 4: the sort of d trans anti transactivists have been so
Speaker 4: successful in targeting this it's like, well, you know, it's
Speaker 4: it's it's it's I think I think it's a kind
Speaker 4: of similar thing to like, oh wow, I wonder why
Speaker 4: like the third KKK was successful in this South And
Speaker 4: it's like hmm hmm. Maybe there are things happening. I
Speaker 4: mean that that is slightly unfair as being a bit
Speaker 4: unfair to them. But you know, there's there's still a
Speaker 4: lot of these sentiments that there's a lot of sort
Speaker 4: of like transphobic sentiments that are just kind of like
Speaker 4: buried beneath the surface. And I think a lot of
Speaker 4: what we've been seeing over the past you know, like
Speaker 4: like eight ish years, what is time hold on? Is
Speaker 4: that God, Okay, I've broken my own rule about not
Speaker 4: trying to do bath life on air. People don't figure
Speaker 4: out that I can't do subtract. But you know, that's
Speaker 4: that's a lot of what's the topic of the last
Speaker 4: like eight years is that people figured out that there's
Speaker 4: still a lot of sort of lingering anti transceniment, and
Speaker 4: they figured out where you can target it in ways
Speaker 4: that are extremely effective. We need to go to ads
Speaker 4: were back in a second with less capitalism, and we're
Speaker 4: back Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean like yeah, I mean I feel
Speaker 1: like like in terms of like medical professionals who want
Speaker 1: a gatekeeper, what like they've they've been using you know,
Speaker 1: de transition and transition regret as like an excuse for
Speaker 1: controlling people for basically since the beginning of trans healthcare.
Speaker 1: I mean not like like you know that gender therapist,
Speaker 1: she like Graham, she went looking for us. She like
Speaker 1: went looking for for de trans people to use. She's like, Okay,
Speaker 1: this is how I'm going to like cut down on
Speaker 1: the number of people transitioning. I'm going to find some
Speaker 1: like de transitioned women and then use their experiences. And
Speaker 1: you know that's what she tried to do. And like
Speaker 1: and I see this happening with other like clinicians too,
Speaker 1: like kind of going back to Ohio Scott Liebowitz, who
Speaker 1: runs he's a therapist who runs the Thrive Clinic in Ohio.
Speaker 1: And he's another one who has used like detransition to
Speaker 1: justify like more psych assessments. And I mean he was
Speaker 1: actually one of the therapists featured in one of the
Speaker 1: New York Times articles that everyone a lot of trans
Speaker 1: people got mad at, the one by Emily Baislon. Was
Speaker 1: it like I forget what it's called selfpies the general
Speaker 1: for gender therapy, where he's like kind of cast is
Speaker 1: this like this poor moderate position who's caught between the
Speaker 1: religious right that wants to ban all trans healthcare and
Speaker 1: these wacky transactivists who just want to let everyone transition.
Speaker 1: It's like he's just trying to find this nuanced approach
Speaker 1: and make sure that like teenagers don't transition and regret it.
Speaker 1: And you know, yeah, you know he was like, I mean,
Speaker 1: like he was trying to stop the healthcare bands in
Speaker 1: Ohio by pointing out, like, oh look, you know we're
Speaker 1: we do comprehensive care. You know, most most youth don't
Speaker 1: go on to medically transition. Like like Carrie Callahan was
Speaker 1: also one of the you know, she and her testimony
Speaker 1: and in some op ed pieces that she wrote, she
Speaker 1: was like praising his approach, calling it conscious cautious. You know,
Speaker 1: people who want to like restrict care implement more gatekeeping
Speaker 1: will use like de transition stories to justify that. And
Speaker 1: then of course, like you know, the religious right, who
Speaker 1: wants to completely wipe out all transition healthcare will also
Speaker 1: use like D transition stories as well. They'll have their
Speaker 1: set of D transition people that they they bring out,
Speaker 1: like Chloe Coole to testify for the bands.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Leibowitz was also one of the colely for the adolescent
Speaker 8: chapter in the Standards of Care eight from w Path.
Speaker 8: This was also partially reported on in the Basilon piece
Speaker 8: since they were given exclusive access to the draft before
Speaker 8: the actual final product was officially published. And so this
Speaker 8: particular chapter, especially compared to most of the other ones,
Speaker 8: was it was basically a dumpster fire. Like it was
Speaker 8: a massive rollback in terms of accurate information. And part
Speaker 8: of this was actually captured by a white paper that
Speaker 8: was written by Kelly Winter's a trans woman.
Speaker 6: You know, she's got a PhD and everything like that.
Speaker 8: She's been paying attention to this stuff for a really
Speaker 8: long time, has been working in aspects of w path
Speaker 8: and trying to like, you know, kind of help reshape
Speaker 8: some of the transphobia that's been happening.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean she's been finding back against like how
Speaker 1: trans people are pathologized and you know, against paternalistic yeah
Speaker 1: healthcare for a very long time now.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 8: So she ended up writing a white paper about Version,
Speaker 8: with a significant section focusing on the adolescent chapter and
Speaker 8: some of the weird like pseudoscience laundering that ended up
Speaker 8: happening because that chapter not only did it include like
Speaker 8: you know, lip service to things like quote unquote rapid
Speaker 8: onset gender dysphoria, which is a this is a bunk
Speaker 8: pseudodiagnosis that was invented by Lisa Littman after surveying a
Speaker 8: bunch of anti transparents. But then within that chapter you
Speaker 8: also see the laundering of specific studies that are focused
Speaker 8: on predominantly de transitioned women, predominantly gender critical or radical feminists.
Speaker 8: These two papers were Litman twenty twenty one, which surveyed
Speaker 8: a lot of the kind of the old D trans
Speaker 8: turf groups that we had been connected with right around
Speaker 8: twenty seventeen or so, so this was before the ROGD
Speaker 8: paper was published in twenty eighteen. But then there was
Speaker 8: also let's say, there's the Vanderbush study, which I believe
Speaker 8: that was published in like what twenty I don't remember
Speaker 8: what year that was published in the Vanderbush study, Now,
Speaker 8: this study was done by Eli vander Bush, who is
Speaker 8: basically post trans half of a gender critical detransition project,
Speaker 8: and it had a very similar kind of like recruitment
Speaker 8: strategy sometimes an overlapping recruitment pool. But the difference is
Speaker 8: that this happened after the rog D paper dropped.
Speaker 4: RGD is that's wrap it on SUT gender dysphoria, which
Speaker 4: is distinct correct, Yeah, to be like all the kids
Speaker 4: are suddenly transitioning, is like no, this is yes, yeah,
Speaker 4: but that's what that is.
Speaker 11: Yep.
Speaker 8: When that paper dropped, a shift in some of the
Speaker 8: narratives from people who are coming out as de transitioned
Speaker 8: was also starting to be observed. More people were starting
Speaker 8: to call themselves as having experienced ROGD.
Speaker 6: This is where the peak Resilience project came from.
Speaker 8: And so as a result, like this BANDI Bush study
Speaker 8: was also pulling in aspects of that kind of narrative
Speaker 8: as well. Right, and you know this, none of this
Speaker 8: actually makes sense. These are wildly biased sample pools. It's
Speaker 8: not going to be generalizable to basically any population. It's
Speaker 8: only focused on like a very particular subset of people
Speaker 8: who end up detransitioning and then develop some kind of
Speaker 8: like political belief it's connected to it, right, And then
Speaker 8: it's being used as legitimate data as part of standards
Speaker 8: of care that is supposed to be like yeah, yes,
Speaker 8: it's just it's particular absolus.
Speaker 1: Well, it is ridiculous, But I don't feel like like
Speaker 1: I feel like the medical professionals who want more gatekeeping,
Speaker 1: like they just need some de transitioned people to justify it.
Speaker 1: They don't really care if like the people ended up
Speaker 1: de transitioning because they like found God or radical feminism
Speaker 1: or like or you know, our old group, a lot
Speaker 1: of de transmit. I think I already mentioned this before,
Speaker 1: Like a lot of us like talked about how like
Speaker 1: we had the same kind of dysphoria than any other
Speaker 1: transperson had and we're.
Speaker 6: Still fighting it off. That was a thing too.
Speaker 1: Most of the people I knew still had gender dysphoria
Speaker 1: and we're just finding like quote unquote alternative ways to
Speaker 1: cope with it. And it's just like, I don't I mean,
Speaker 1: a lot of people were trying to like talk themselves
Speaker 1: out of like transitioning again. So I don't think the
Speaker 1: issue here is like, oh, transition didn't work for these people.
Speaker 1: It's more like they internalized the idea that no one
Speaker 1: should transition. But again, like people don't. It's like people don't, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they only care about using D transition in order to
Speaker 1: reduce the number of trans people or prevent transition. They
Speaker 1: don't care about transition or d transition that you know
Speaker 1: results from transphobia either internalizing it, yeah, internalizing it an
Speaker 1: anti trans ideology, or you know, not being able to
Speaker 1: access transition because of living in a transphoba, coming from
Speaker 1: a transphobic family, you know, having to go into the
Speaker 1: closet to find a job, that kind of stuff. Like
Speaker 1: it's never about like yeah, it's never about preventing due
Speaker 1: transition that results from from transphobia. It's just about finding
Speaker 1: excuse to control us and our access to healthcare. There's
Speaker 1: this perverse incentive structure here too, because you know, these
Speaker 1: doctors are trying to find you know, they're trying to
Speaker 1: find something that gives.
Speaker 4: Them more ability to do gatekeeping. So it's it's it's
Speaker 4: in their interest to in order to in order to
Speaker 4: preserve and increase their own power, to find this kind
Speaker 4: of stuff, which means that they're not actually doing their job.
Speaker 4: They're going out and trying to find ways to like
Speaker 4: they're trying to find, you know, whatever whatever like absolutely
Speaker 4: dog shit studies or like just stuff that like probably
Speaker 4: should be considered medical malpractice. Like they don't really care
Speaker 4: because again it's it's it's it's just this like loop
Speaker 4: because that's the thing that they need. So they'll they'll
Speaker 4: find whatever, like bank pseudo scientists just like cranking the
Speaker 4: stuff out and they'll use.
Speaker 1: It, yeah, I mean, and also I mean I also
Speaker 1: feel like this is one of the reasons why there
Speaker 1: aren't more resources for people who end up de transitioning too,
Speaker 1: because they want to be able to use as a
Speaker 1: scarce scare story, right because like really, I mean, like okay,
Speaker 1: like you know, I do transitioned, and like it was
Speaker 1: hard because there weren't as much like resources and support
Speaker 1: out there. And I mean a lot of the supports
Speaker 1: I did find were crappy because they were coming from TERFs.
Speaker 1: But it's like it's really just kind of like transitioning
Speaker 1: again in a lot of ways. So it's like, well,
Speaker 1: if you can create resources to make transitioning easier, you
Speaker 1: could definitely create a lot of similar resources to make
Speaker 1: do transitioning easier.
Speaker 6: But that's not there.
Speaker 1: And I feel like like one of the reasons that
Speaker 1: is not there is because if like if it's easy
Speaker 1: for someone to do transition, get what they need to
Speaker 1: have a good life, and just move on, then it's
Speaker 1: hard to use those stories. Like you'll have less people
Speaker 1: who want to, like you know who you can kind
Speaker 1: of like, uh, you know, indoctrinate into these anti trans
Speaker 1: ideologies and then use them, you know, as part of
Speaker 1: the anti trans movement, but also just like I mean,
Speaker 1: if it's not scary anymore, if you just feel like, okay,
Speaker 1: like this is just an issue of like making people
Speaker 1: making sure people get the supports they need so they
Speaker 1: can just get on with their lives, Like you just
Speaker 1: treat it as a practical problem that needs to be
Speaker 1: solved instead of using it to feed a trans panic.
Speaker 1: Like yeah, it's just like the the there's actually like
Speaker 1: less reasons for gatekeeping. I mean, I feel like like
Speaker 1: creating like basically you're kind of like creating a safety
Speaker 1: net for in case, like you know, in case something
Speaker 1: unexpected or negative happens. So you're like, okay, well, if
Speaker 1: you transition and things you end up changing your mind
Speaker 1: or things don't work out the way you think they would,
Speaker 1: here's all these supports you can turn to. So I
Speaker 1: feel like that's kind of a better long term thing
Speaker 1: to work for It is, like, okay, like make sure
Speaker 1: there are supports for people no matter how their transition
Speaker 1: turns out, Like if then including you know, de transitioning,
Speaker 1: or if people like you know, face health complications, like
Speaker 1: make sure that there's like support some place for that.
Speaker 1: Don't use that as an excuse for gatekeeping.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's unfortunately one that I know all too well
Speaker 6: the consequences of.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think I think also the everything that's
Speaker 4: going on is there's just like all of these groups
Speaker 4: see both trans people and people do transitions as just
Speaker 4: not like like they're you know, they're they're they're violating
Speaker 4: the content categorical comperative in the sense that they're not
Speaker 4: treating people as actual humans or treating them as objects
Speaker 4: or tools. Yes, and once you do, when you do that, right,
Speaker 4: like everything suddenly, you know, like who cares what happens
Speaker 4: to these people afterwards because you don't think of them
Speaker 4: as people. You think of them as just a thing
Speaker 4: that you're using to do another thing.
Speaker 6: Mm hm oh yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 8: The unfortunate thing is that unfort like this can also
Speaker 8: happen within the community as well. When they are trying
Speaker 8: to advocate for certain kinds of things, people will end
Speaker 8: up using each other, oh yeah, as tools in order
Speaker 8: to meet their own personal goals.
Speaker 4: Speaking of goals, make it your goal to buy these
Speaker 4: products and services. Zh No, we're back.
Speaker 8: So let's go back a little bit to about like
Speaker 8: twenty nineteen. Some of the bills are starting to go out.
Speaker 8: We had the test balloon build that was happening in
Speaker 8: South Dakota that eventually turned into twenty twenty. Right in
Speaker 8: this timeframe, an organizing call went out on the Well,
Speaker 8: the site previously known as Twitter by Kerry Callahan that
Speaker 8: was looking for people that wanted to advocate for better
Speaker 8: healthcare outcomes for trans and d trans people. Right during
Speaker 8: that time frame, I had been starting.
Speaker 6: To go off of my hormones.
Speaker 8: I started going off of them a few months prior
Speaker 8: to that point, and in that time frame, I started
Speaker 8: experiencing certain types of what seemed like progressive vision loss
Speaker 8: right my brain I sometimes have a tendency to panic,
Speaker 8: I guess, especially when it comes to things like health anxiety.
Speaker 8: My brain started to make the internal connection, did going
Speaker 8: off of my hormones cause my vision to change?
Speaker 9: Right?
Speaker 8: And unfortunately, as I started to talk about this online
Speaker 8: and the likes, I was getting a lot of encouragement
Speaker 8: from other folks, usually like you know, gender critical, anti transparents,
Speaker 8: that kind of thing, that yes, absolutely like the hormones
Speaker 8: were causing me to have vision loss right and it
Speaker 8: was really impacting my ability to function in my daily
Speaker 8: life right but another part of me, at the same
Speaker 8: time as all of this was starting to feel like
Speaker 8: I was starting to feel aspects of regret and anger,
Speaker 8: which made me want to do something. This is a
Speaker 8: very common narrative, right, It made me want to do
Speaker 8: something so that other people would not end up in
Speaker 8: the situation that I was in. And so I answered
Speaker 8: this call. Probably not the best of decisions that I
Speaker 8: could have made for myself, but I decided.
Speaker 6: To go ahead and do so.
Speaker 8: Answered Kerrie Calhoun's call. Yes, Yes, I decided to go
Speaker 8: ahead and say, yes, I will. I will connect in
Speaker 8: with this. I would like to be a part of it.
Speaker 8: I had to apparently apologize for talking to the wrong
Speaker 8: clinician in public first.
Speaker 6: But.
Speaker 1: No, you had to apologize for talking to Jack Turbin
Speaker 1: because he was too affirming and she was mad that
Speaker 1: you would speak to him because I was too willing to.
Speaker 10: Kids.
Speaker 8: Yes, yes, because he prescribed puberty blockers. I was talking
Speaker 8: to the wrong clinician and therefore this was not allowed.
Speaker 8: But anyway, so eventually the actual like organizing committee starts
Speaker 8: with four people. So it was me Carrie Corina Cone,
Speaker 8: who was later testifying in favor of some of these bills,
Speaker 8: and then Grace Leedinsky Smith. There were some other people
Speaker 8: that were in and out, but they ended up dropping
Speaker 8: off very early on. So it was predominantly the four
Speaker 8: of us that ended up being the actual formal board
Speaker 8: at any point in the early stages, right, And so
Speaker 8: we started to draft a lot of this stuff. But like,
Speaker 8: over I was starting to wonder about two things, right, Like,
Speaker 8: after some exchanges with other board members about who it
Speaker 8: is that we should be predominantly outreaching. Should it be
Speaker 8: clinicians or should it be people that are actually impacted,
Speaker 8: people who have gone through gender affirming care, regardless of
Speaker 8: how they identify themselves currently, Like, what is our main priority?
Speaker 8: The other board member at the time wanted to focus
Speaker 8: more on the clinician route.
Speaker 7: I did not.
Speaker 8: My focus was on if we are going to be
Speaker 8: doing a quote unquote patient advocacy organization, we should be
Speaker 8: focusing on the people that we are supposed to be
Speaker 8: connected to, right, Like, those are who we are.
Speaker 6: Why would we want to put more power into the
Speaker 6: hands of the clinicians that supposedly harmed people. That doesn't
Speaker 6: make any sense, right? And then, like you know, as
Speaker 6: these wheels were starting to churn.
Speaker 8: Another part of me was starting to worry that over time,
Speaker 8: the trajectory of this organization at that point was going
Speaker 8: to start advocating for more restrictions or full out bands
Speaker 8: later on in the future, possibly even partnering up with
Speaker 8: some of the some of the more right wing groups
Speaker 8: I believe I actually.
Speaker 6: I I think I.
Speaker 8: I worried about them becoming like the gender care equivalent
Speaker 8: to Wolf, which was unfortunately pretty accurate, I would say
Speaker 8: in terms of my my concern that was. That was
Speaker 8: part of my my formal resignation to the board. I
Speaker 8: stepped down as vice president about five months after I
Speaker 8: had joined on because I could not see any I
Speaker 8: could not see any recourse within the group for for
Speaker 8: changing directions. I couldn't be party to them hurting other people,
Speaker 8: even if I felt hurt at the time, and so
Speaker 8: I ended up taking a step back. My vision was
Speaker 8: still having problems, but you know what ended up making
Speaker 8: that a lot easier. Actually, it's funny, this is not
Speaker 8: something that was recommended to me by anybody that I
Speaker 8: had been talking to about this stuff who had been
Speaker 8: more exposed to anti trans rhetoric like I I talked
Speaker 8: to blind people. Yeah, I ended up talking to to
Speaker 8: blind people. I connected with folks from the National Federation
Speaker 8: for the Blind. It was a group that was recommended
Speaker 8: to me by somebody I knew from a from a
Speaker 8: past job that I had, because she was the daughter
Speaker 8: of somebody who went blind later in life due to
Speaker 8: a genetic condition, and he was a member of the
Speaker 8: NFB right he was part of the federation, and so
Speaker 8: that was her recommendation to me. I hadn't reached out
Speaker 8: at the time.
Speaker 6: My brain was too.
Speaker 8: Focused in doing this weird we got to save people
Speaker 8: kind of bullshit direction.
Speaker 6: But like eventually, after I'm like.
Speaker 8: Taking a step back from all of this stuff, I
Speaker 8: decided to go ahead and pursue that suggestion from you know,
Speaker 8: this random person in my life, not from anybody I
Speaker 8: had been connected to in terms of organizing. And when
Speaker 8: when I went there, like the only thing that I
Speaker 8: ever got was acceptance. There was no questioning. Nobody asked
Speaker 8: what happened, Nobody asked like any sort of details about
Speaker 8: like my my personal views. Like I didn't have to
Speaker 8: express any forms of like, you know, sorrow or regret
Speaker 8: or anything like that. A lot of it was focused on, Okay,
Speaker 8: these are the issues that you're currently dealing with. Here
Speaker 8: are some of the things that you can work on
Speaker 8: to make your life easier.
Speaker 6: Here are some.
Speaker 8: Supports that you can find within your states if you
Speaker 8: need to do things like you know, get certain kinds
Speaker 8: of mobility training using a white cane and the likes,
Speaker 8: if you need to learn how to use braille, all
Speaker 8: of that fun stuff. Here, here's even like specific doctors
Speaker 8: that you could try to go to who can like
Speaker 8: really assess what's going on with your vision. Because before
Speaker 8: that point, I did not have access to specialists. I
Speaker 8: was living in like you know, rural main There was
Speaker 8: there was nothing there. I would have had to travel
Speaker 8: like over three hours to go to Boston for me
Speaker 8: to be able to see as specialist. Instead, like they
Speaker 8: were able to point me to people who had specializations
Speaker 8: in like retinal conditions, and so when I went there,
Speaker 8: you know, they they did their usual tests. They ruled
Speaker 8: out some things that were known to run in my
Speaker 8: family actually, but they did ultimately decide that, like my
Speaker 8: retinas are not processing like correctly, and that it's actually
Speaker 8: likely genetic.
Speaker 1: So unrelated to horrormone youth comes related to hormone usage.
Speaker 8: In fact, you know, as I was going through that process,
Speaker 8: and I started to reflect on and what my vision
Speaker 8: was like before I even took hormones, let alone stopping it,
Speaker 8: Like certain symptoms were actually there, just at a much
Speaker 8: lower degree. Since, like at least my teens, I already
Speaker 8: had difficulties with my night vision. I had difficulties with
Speaker 8: color contrasts. Sometimes my light sensitivity wasn't nearly as bad.
Speaker 8: Usually it was only with migrains, but over time, like
Speaker 8: you know, that started to break out more where like
Speaker 8: even just like you know, there being too much sunlight
Speaker 8: was painful for me. But like some of this stuff,
Speaker 8: it definitely predated when I started my transition. But because
Speaker 8: I wasn't really given space to actually unpack any of
Speaker 8: this stuff, I didn't really have the ability to make
Speaker 8: those connections. Instead, what happened was, you know, I join
Speaker 8: in on this organizing board. I connect in with three
Speaker 8: other people that were looking to advocate in very particular directions,
Speaker 8: and like my my story was not something that was
Speaker 8: meant to get support. My story was something that was
Speaker 8: meant to scare people. I was also nominated as the spokesperson,
Speaker 8: which meant I would have had the responsibility to do
Speaker 8: things like, you know, respond to the press or give
Speaker 8: sound quotes or whatever. Right, I gave certain kinds of
Speaker 8: descriptions over to a like a democratic candidate that we
Speaker 8: had been scheduled to meet with Ryan Starzik at the
Speaker 8: time down in Arizona, and you know, give the whole spiel, right,
Speaker 8: you know, a visible trans person with a story that
Speaker 8: for a lot of people who, like most people, are
Speaker 8: very conne to their senses, whether that's hearing, vision, touch
Speaker 8: or whatever, they can't conceptualize a life without them, and
Speaker 8: so it terrifies them. Right, But like that doesn't actually
Speaker 8: help the person be able to get to a point
Speaker 8: where this is a livable life, it's even a frame life.
Speaker 8: There are certain things that I can do that other
Speaker 8: people can't do. I can navigate inside the apartment without
Speaker 8: having the lights on because I know where everything is
Speaker 8: mapped out of my head, and I can rely on touch.
Speaker 8: I can pour myself a glass of water and not
Speaker 8: have to worry about its spilling because I can feel
Speaker 8: where it like goes up. But that's not really something
Speaker 8: that like we're not even allowed to think about. We're
Speaker 8: not even allowed to think about, Like, Okay, so if
Speaker 8: this thing happens to you and there's documented evidence of it,
Speaker 8: not like something that's completely imagined, like my brain decided
Speaker 8: it was, here's what we can do to help. That's
Speaker 8: that's the kind of things people really need to be
Speaker 8: able to access, right, you know, if something happens to you,
Speaker 8: these are the things that you can do to be
Speaker 8: able to work through this and live a more comfortable
Speaker 8: life in the way that you are happy with. But
Speaker 8: I don't really see any of that happening to be
Speaker 8: perfectly frank well, no, Like I'm also thinking back about that,
Speaker 8: like the standards of care A because like you know,
Speaker 8: there's this you know, inclusion of aspects of regret and
Speaker 8: de transition and stuff like that into things like the
Speaker 8: adolescent chapter. But you know what, they don't include a
Speaker 8: chapter for de transition support. Yes, no, because they're not
Speaker 8: serious about that.
Speaker 1: I guess I just want to use it as like
Speaker 1: a scared story and a justification for controlling people exactly,
Speaker 1: you know, putting them through a bunch of assessments or
Speaker 1: something like that. Like again, I very much believe that
Speaker 1: there's a connection between like a desire for more gatekeeping
Speaker 1: and psych assessments, control over trans people and not having
Speaker 1: support for like de transition transition either because there's not
Speaker 1: like I feel like there's even less talk or resources
Speaker 1: for people end up retransitioning after de transitioning, because no
Speaker 1: one's trying to figure out like, oh, like the idea
Speaker 1: that transition could just be temporary or that a lot
Speaker 1: of people you don't go on to retransition later on
Speaker 1: or just confirms for them that they really are brands.
Speaker 6: Like that's also a thing that you know, just just
Speaker 6: people don't really want to touch.
Speaker 4: It's one of these things where you know, like pain
Speaker 4: is useful to these people, but like the actual like
Speaker 4: people experiencing the pain aren't, and you know, and that
Speaker 4: has its own perversion center cycle because like, yeah, if
Speaker 4: you want to harvest scare stories, you don't want people
Speaker 4: getting actual help. And that is an absolutely terrible, incensive
Speaker 4: structure for making sure people actually get the care and
Speaker 4: the help that they need, and it absolutely sucks.
Speaker 1: Just yeah, oh I remember realizing, like when I was
Speaker 1: still a de Trens radical feminist, like realizing that a
Speaker 1: whole lot of like people who wanted to restrict or
Speaker 1: lumny transition like like headed investment in my suffering.
Speaker 6: Because you know, I was, and I was struggling a
Speaker 6: lot like I do.
Speaker 1: It can really be hard to do transition like right
Speaker 1: now because there are you know, there is a lack
Speaker 1: of resources and support and understanding. But the thing is,
Speaker 1: like I you know, I kind of slowly realized over time,
Speaker 1: it's just like, oh, all these people want to use
Speaker 1: my story, but they need me to suffer for it
Speaker 1: to like work out for them. Like they don't have
Speaker 1: any interest in making my life easier, Like they don't
Speaker 1: have any interest in like helping me like create a
Speaker 1: good life and being happy. They want me, they really
Speaker 1: do want me to be ruined and miserable forever because
Speaker 1: they can use like that's more valuable to them, Like
Speaker 1: my suffering matters more than my happiness to a lot
Speaker 1: of these people. Like you know, that was definitely one
Speaker 1: of those moments where I was like, what, like one
Speaker 1: of those things that eventually, you know, led me to
Speaker 1: get disillusion with the whole thing and be like you
Speaker 1: know what I get myself involved with? But yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just it's it is really like sick and perverse.
Speaker 1: How how anti trans people like you suffering use both
Speaker 1: trans anti trans people suffering for their own agenda.
Speaker 6: It's awful.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I think this is something that you know,
Speaker 4: there's this is the sort of it's it's also that
Speaker 4: there's a broader set of incentives here too, which is
Speaker 4: the sort of the structure of the media market, right,
Speaker 4: which that the media that's like the like you know,
Speaker 4: the the entire media broadly, like you know, like if
Speaker 4: it bleeds, it leads, right Like that's that's that's the
Speaker 4: that's the actual media model of you know, everything from
Speaker 4: like your like shitty local right wing tabloid to like
Speaker 4: the New York Times, right mm hmm. And the way
Speaker 4: that this plays out for trans people and for de
Speaker 4: trans people is that like like the thing that these
Speaker 4: people that you know, the journalists also are looking for
Speaker 4: is suffering. Like they don't really care, you know, like
Speaker 4: they like none of these people ever report stories that
Speaker 4: are just like hey, like I went to a gender
Speaker 4: clinic and it was great, Like nobody's gonna read like
Speaker 4: I don't think anyone's going to read that, Like I
Speaker 4: would read that because you know that's you know, that's great,
Speaker 4: but like like they don't care about that that there's
Speaker 4: there's no sort of sensationalism there. The sensationalism is like,
Speaker 4: you know, then this is why you get like the
Speaker 4: Washington Post interviewing this light. You know, like these people
Speaker 4: who are just like, oh, like I was, I worked
Speaker 4: at a gender clinic, but I was secretly doing evil
Speaker 4: or like you know, or or or you get all
Speaker 4: of it. And this is why a lot of even
Speaker 4: protrans like media coverage is about things like suicide rates
Speaker 4: and about things like, you know, like how like how
Speaker 4: likely you are to die if you don't cut the
Speaker 4: health care that you need, because it's it's the same
Speaker 4: as inra structure. It's the thing, the thing that's useful
Speaker 4: to sell to people is suffering and that I don't
Speaker 4: know what the solution is to that, because I mean,
Speaker 4: I don't know have have media that's not based on profit,
Speaker 4: I guess, but like you know, decommodify the news. But
Speaker 4: that's one of these things where it's like, you know,
Speaker 4: like as long as long as like every single like
Speaker 4: shitty local newspaper is making all of their money from
Speaker 4: like crime scare stories, they're not going to report. They're
Speaker 4: not going to You're not gonna get active reporting about
Speaker 4: police because they need the police to give them, like
Speaker 4: feed them all of these shitty crime stories, right, And
Speaker 4: this is the same thing here where it's like you're
Speaker 4: not going to get actual good reporting about trans people
Speaker 4: and about people who do transition because nobody actually cares
Speaker 4: about that because the incentive structure is just suffering and
Speaker 4: that trickles down through through the healthcare system and through
Speaker 4: you know, through through the legislative system, and it trickles
Speaker 4: down through our social networks and what support networks exist
Speaker 4: and don't exist. And it's a absolutely like if you
Speaker 4: were just to like ask someone how do you want
Speaker 4: a society to be run, zero people would answer we
Speaker 4: want it to be based on the production of suffering.
Speaker 4: And yet we have done this, but it doesn't have
Speaker 4: to be like this. To sort of finish that David
Speaker 4: Graver quote, the ultimate hidden truth of the world is
Speaker 4: that it is something that we make and could just
Speaker 4: as easily make differently. So let's go build a world
Speaker 4: that's safe for trans people. This has been nickeld happened here.
Speaker 4: You can find more of Lee and Kai's work a
Speaker 4: Health Liberation Now dot com. I recommend you go do it.
Speaker 4: It is great and go and make the world.
Speaker 3: Otherwise welcome back to it could happen here.
Speaker 2: I am, once again Robert Evans talking about it happening
Speaker 2: here and in the case of today, because we mean
Speaker 2: something different every time I introduce the show. That way,
Speaker 2: we're talking about the carserral state and the worst reactive
Speaker 2: impulses of society coming for people who use drugs recreationally,
Speaker 2: who either have a problem or don't with them and
Speaker 2: simply don't want to go to prison for it. And specifically,
Speaker 2: we're talking about all of that within the context of
Speaker 2: the state of Oregon, where I reside, because back in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty, the state of Oregon passed a measure, the
Speaker 2: first in the nation, decriminalizing all simple possession and use
Speaker 2: of street drugs. So heroin, methamphetamine, marijuana was already legal,
Speaker 2: but you.
Speaker 3: Know everything is.
Speaker 2: You can't get arrested for simple possession of small amounts
Speaker 2: of stuff, right, That's the gist of the law. This
Speaker 2: passed by a pretty wide margin, fifty eight points something
Speaker 2: percent of Oregonians voted for it. It was a ballot measure,
Speaker 2: not something the legislature pushed through, and it came as Oregon,
Speaker 2: like the rest of the country, was kind of wrapped
Speaker 2: in the grip of an escalating drug crisis. In twenty twenty,
Speaker 2: and again that's before the ballot measure passed, Oregon had
Speaker 2: the second highest rate of drug addiction in the country
Speaker 2: and ranked nearly last in access to treatment. From twenty
Speaker 2: nineteen to twenty twenty, opioid overdose deaths in Oregon increased
Speaker 2: by about seventy percent. So that makes the case that
Speaker 2: the problem prior to the ballot measure was pretty severe
Speaker 2: and that the current state of affairs, which was everything
Speaker 2: was illegal and you could go to jail for possession of, say, heroin,
Speaker 2: was not working out for anybody. However, in the years
Speaker 2: since the ballot measure passed, overdoses have continued to rise
Speaker 2: in Oregon, and miraculous almost the drug problem did not
Speaker 2: solve itself overnight. Now we're gonna be talking about some
Speaker 2: reasons for that. But now it is time for me
Speaker 2: to introduce our guest for the episode, Oregon Public Defender
Speaker 2: Grant Hartley Grant, Welcome.
Speaker 3: To the show.
Speaker 12: Yeah, thanks for having me, Robert, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: So, first off, I wanted to say from where you're
Speaker 2: standing as somebody whose job is to represent Oregonians generally
Speaker 2: with the least resources who were charged with crimes. What
Speaker 2: were you saying prior to one ten and what are
Speaker 2: you saying after it?
Speaker 12: Well, I think prior to one ten, we had, you know,
Speaker 12: a population similar to what we have now, which is
Speaker 12: individuals who were struggling with houselessness, with housing instability, who
Speaker 12: were struggling with mental health. And as a result of
Speaker 12: many of those factors and others were copied with substances,
Speaker 12: and as a result of that, many of them would
Speaker 12: get wrapped into the legal system. And one of the
Speaker 12: issues with our legal system is that it is based
Speaker 12: on compulsion, and so when someone came into the system
Speaker 12: with a drug problem, our first reaction is to compel
Speaker 12: them into treatment, to force them into treatment, even though
Speaker 12: we know that that is not effective, and you know
Speaker 12: at times it can be. And generally where you see
Speaker 12: the most success with it is where there's more hanging
Speaker 12: over the person's head, more leverage that the system has.
Speaker 12: And so, you know, somebody who has a substance use
Speaker 12: disorder and commits a robbery and is put on probation
Speaker 12: and they have a choice between going to prison and
Speaker 12: doing treatment, much more likely to engage in treatment. But
Speaker 12: when you have low level possession, where as a society
Speaker 12: we've deemed that should not be punished by prison, and
Speaker 12: frankly that should not be punished by jail. The problem
Speaker 12: is is that the only tool that the system has
Speaker 12: is jail, and so if somebody says I'm not ready
Speaker 12: for treatment, the system says, well, we're going to put
Speaker 12: you in jail that and then they go to jail,
Speaker 12: they're what little they have is destabilized and they get
Speaker 12: out without any treatment. And as you mentioned in the opening,
Speaker 12: the biggest thing is just the incredible dearth of services
Speaker 12: in our community. There is not nearly enough outpatient treatment,
Speaker 12: but especially in patient treatment, and that's that's important for
Speaker 12: those houseless folks, because you can't expect somebody to engage
Speaker 12: in outpatient treatment and then go back and sleep on
Speaker 12: the street at night and not use So I know
Speaker 12: that's I think the general gist of what it looked like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's all really important to keep in mind,
Speaker 2: and it's particularly important and the reason we're doing this
Speaker 2: episode is because the last two years really is when
Speaker 2: it's escalated. We have seen this increasing and very organized
Speaker 2: campaign against One ten and it's being pushed by the
Speaker 2: police who are angry that they're not able to arrest
Speaker 2: more people, particularly more homeless people. It's pushed by a
Speaker 2: lot of business owners who have convinced themselves that the
Speaker 2: reason why downtown Portland has had such a hard couple
Speaker 2: of years is because there's too many homeless people and
Speaker 2: they can go after them and get them off the
Speaker 2: street by having them arrested. This is all my opinion,
Speaker 2: not yours here, but there has been What is not
Speaker 2: up for opinion is that there has been an escalating
Speaker 2: campaign to portray the measure as a disaster and to
Speaker 2: portray it as the center of particularly Portland's ills, but
Speaker 2: also more broadly the state of Oregon's ills. And I
Speaker 2: think there's a number of reasons why that's dishonest, which
Speaker 2: we'll talk about. But where that's kind of culminated now
Speaker 2: is this year. There are two big pushes to get
Speaker 2: rid of one ten. One of them is the push
Speaker 2: by a ballot measure or to put out a ballot
Speaker 2: measure basically repealing one ten as it exists, and the
Speaker 2: other is a push by the legislature. And you kind
Speaker 2: of have separate plans pushed by the DIMS and the
Speaker 2: Republicans to in the case of the Republican plan, basically
Speaker 2: put things back to the way they were, if not
Speaker 2: more severe in terms of your ability to arrest people
Speaker 2: for possession. And the Democrats' plans is to re criminalized
Speaker 2: possession but make it all basically at the lowest level
Speaker 2: of misdemeanor. I don't think either of those are good plans,
Speaker 2: But I wanted to talk about kind of how you
Speaker 2: would characterize the backlash campaign against one ten and how
Speaker 2: much of it do you think is rooted in actual
Speaker 2: problems caused.
Speaker 3: By the measure?
Speaker 12: No, I mean it is caused the most of the backlash.
Speaker 12: I would agree with you that it is a lot
Speaker 12: of business communities, but it's also just you know, average
Speaker 12: Portlanders because what they see is people on the streets struggling,
Speaker 12: using drugs in public because that is the only place
Speaker 12: that they can use drugs, and you know, that's a
Speaker 12: problem of houselessness. They people have to ask themselves, am
Speaker 12: I upset that I'm seeing somebody use drugs? Or am
Speaker 12: I upset that this person is sleeping on the street
Speaker 12: and needing to use the drugs in the street. And
Speaker 12: that is the same of business owners. You know, they
Speaker 12: call and complain that there's somebody on the stoop next
Speaker 12: to them using fentanyl, But is the issue that that
Speaker 12: person is using fentanyl or is the issue that that
Speaker 12: person is on the stoop next to them? Because there
Speaker 12: are no housing services in our city and so really
Speaker 12: Measure one ten is being scapegoaded for two huge issues,
Speaker 12: which is the influx of synthetic heroin or fentanyl into
Speaker 12: our community and into every community around the nation. It
Speaker 12: is not restricted to Portland or to Oregon because we decriminalized,
Speaker 12: it is everywhere. And then just the houselessness crisis, which
Speaker 12: is tremendous in our city. It is so bad, and
Speaker 12: people are essentially arguing that because we decriminalize drugs, more
Speaker 12: people are on the street, and I just don't think
Speaker 12: that there is any data to support that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think part of the reason why people
Speaker 2: suspect that is again because of how much dramatically worse
Speaker 2: the problem has gotten in recent years. But it's gotten
Speaker 2: worse everywhere. It's gotten worse in states like Oklahoma, where
Speaker 2: it is and has remained very illegal to possess this stuff.
Speaker 2: Oregon is not the state with the worst death problem
Speaker 2: due to drugs, per capita, and the states that are
Speaker 2: worse or are worse in various ways, are all states
Speaker 2: in which it's criminalized. It's very frustrated to me when
Speaker 2: you look at like, well, we passed one ten in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty, and these problems have gotten worse since, and
Speaker 2: it's like, well, but these are all problems that have
Speaker 2: gotten worse everywhere, and they are problems that are not
Speaker 2: driven by legality or at least the fact that it's
Speaker 2: no longer criminal to possess heroin. It's driven by the
Speaker 2: fact that we had a horrible pandemic that traumatized people.
Speaker 2: They lost loved ones, they lost jobs, they lost support.
Speaker 2: It's driven by the fact that the price of housing
Speaker 2: continues to rise. It's driven by inflation. It's driven by
Speaker 2: the fact that, I mean, to no small part, everybody's
Speaker 2: got brain worms from social media. That's not a zero
Speaker 2: percent factor in both people's anger at the houseless and
Speaker 2: in the fact that people are falling through the cracks.
Speaker 3: Like we have a million different things.
Speaker 2: I don't mean the list that is a comprehensive list
Speaker 2: of our problems, either, like drug addiction and drug deaths
Speaker 2: due to overdoses are caused by a variety of things.
Speaker 2: And one of the reasons why the death rate has
Speaker 2: been so high is that if you're addicted to heroin,
Speaker 2: you can't just stop doing heroin or the consequences are really,
Speaker 2: really horrible, worse than a lot of people are going
Speaker 2: to deal with. And so people keep using, and they
Speaker 2: keep getting drugs that have been tainted with fentanyl, and
Speaker 2: it's hard not to die doing that. Like, rich people
Speaker 2: can continue to test their kids. People who are you know,
Speaker 2: have had the benefit of not just education, but a
Speaker 2: stable home in which to do drugs and sort of
Speaker 2: the resources to know and to be able to test
Speaker 2: their shit, will test their shit. But most street level
Speaker 2: users don't have that kind of option. And it frustrates
Speaker 2: me that it's all getting scapegoaded this on this ballot measure,
Speaker 2: And so I wanted to talk a little bit about
Speaker 2: how they're attempting to go after one ten because it
Speaker 2: looks like right now the primary threat is legislative part,
Speaker 2: because if they push another ballot measure, Oregonians get to
Speaker 2: vote and we'll see how they vote. But reversing it
Speaker 2: by ten, you know, almost a ten percent lead, is
Speaker 2: not an easy thing to do, and I kind of
Speaker 2: think Oregonians might surprise them in terms of not being
Speaker 2: willing to repeal this thing legislatively. We don't have really
Speaker 2: that kind of option against it. If they're able to
Speaker 2: get a kind of enough people behind an essential repeal,
Speaker 2: and they'll frame it as you know, we're just trying
Speaker 2: to tinker with the law to make it work better.
Speaker 2: But if they can get enough people behind that, there's
Speaker 2: really nothing to do about it, right, Yeah.
Speaker 12: Yeah, And I think you know, one of the things that,
Speaker 12: in my opinion was a strategy on the part of
Speaker 12: the opponents of one ten was I mean, they have
Speaker 12: some very wealthy financial backers, yes, and so you know
Speaker 12: it is not cheap to do a ballot measure, and
Speaker 12: you know, they know that they can use that money
Speaker 12: to do media buys and to spread all of the
Speaker 12: misinformation that they've been spreading thus far. And I think
Speaker 12: that frankly, there are people in the legislature that don't
Speaker 12: want to recriminalize but feel that it is the lesser
Speaker 12: of two evils. And the unfortunate thing is that what
Speaker 12: we are essentially doing is delivering them a watered down
Speaker 12: version of that ballot measure. And they were intentional in
Speaker 12: that ballot measure. I mean, they made it as bad
Speaker 12: as could be. That it includes more than just recriminalization.
Speaker 12: You know, it includes what is commonly known as lend
Speaker 12: bias law in federal courts, which is essentially that people
Speaker 12: who deliver a substance that causes an overdose can be
Speaker 12: prosecuted essentially for murder. And it is a archaic understanding
Speaker 12: of how the distribution of drugs works or the testing
Speaker 12: of drugs works, And so they tried to make it
Speaker 12: as bad as possible in order for the legislature to
Speaker 12: essentially go, well, we don't want that to happen. And
Speaker 12: you know, I would worry about a ballot measure. I mean,
Speaker 12: I agree with you that it's a big swing, and
Speaker 12: I have faith in the voters of Oregon. But the
Speaker 12: fact is is that the media has portrayed this very unfairly.
Speaker 12: You know, there was an article recently from the editorial
Speaker 12: board at The Oregonian and they advocated for recriminalization, and
Speaker 12: in it they cited that they want a data driven approach.
Speaker 12: There was not a piece of data in that article.
Speaker 12: It was all based on misinformation. And the same is true.
Speaker 12: I mean, law enforcement are the worst about this. You know,
Speaker 12: they're constantly saying, oh, well, we just want tools so
Speaker 12: that we can confiscate the drugs and so that we
Speaker 12: can refer people to treatment, because we all know that's
Speaker 12: all police officers want to do. And yet when you
Speaker 12: look at the E citations that came out of Measure
Speaker 12: one ten, those were meant as to be a referral tool.
Speaker 12: And that was one of the big mistakes of one
Speaker 12: ten is trying to use police officers as an ambassador
Speaker 12: for treatment. There is a culture in the police community
Speaker 12: that it treats drugs as crimes. Right, you are a
Speaker 12: criminal if you are a drug user, and I am not.
Speaker 12: You know, I'm not saying police are a monolith. I'm
Speaker 12: saying that is the culture that exists. And to expect
Speaker 12: them to change that overnight because the voters said they
Speaker 12: wanted to decriminalize was rather naive and it's obvious because
Speaker 12: just here in Maltnoma County, I think in basically a
Speaker 12: twenty four month period they issued something like nine hundred
Speaker 12: E citations or that was during a thirty month period,
Speaker 12: excuse me. And during a twenty four month period in
Speaker 12: twenty eighteen and twenty nineteen, they arrested more than thirty
Speaker 12: three hundred people on PCs, and that is what nearly
Speaker 12: three times more than three times as many people when
Speaker 12: they were able to put handcuffs on the people that
Speaker 12: they were meeting with, and Maltnoma County was actually better
Speaker 12: than a most you look at Washington County, seventy one
Speaker 12: e citations in thirty months. Seventy one tickets were given
Speaker 12: on this and the ticket was supposed to be the
Speaker 12: tool by which somebody is referred to treatment, and so
Speaker 12: you know, in some ways, Measure one ten had some
Speaker 12: serious structural and implementation issues, but that doesn't mean that
Speaker 12: we just go back to what the voters saw.
Speaker 2: One of the things that was the biggest issue in
Speaker 2: implementation is that a lot of funds were supposed to
Speaker 2: be redirected, I think from marijuana sales was one of
Speaker 2: the places to treatment facilities and treatment options for people
Speaker 2: like these people who are supposed to be getting tickets
Speaker 2: instead of arrested for drug use were supposed to being
Speaker 2: kind of pushed gently towards options, but the actual money
Speaker 2: for those options took more than a year to start arriving,
Speaker 2: and it is still not at a very good clip
Speaker 2: and there's a number of reasons for this, but like
Speaker 2: when they frame it as like will be decriminalized stuff,
Speaker 2: and all these problems kept getting worse, It's like, well,
Speaker 2: for one thing, they kept getting worse. They were getting
Speaker 2: worse when everything was illegal at a rapid pace. And
Speaker 2: number two, you didn't do what was supposed to be
Speaker 2: half of the measure, which was increasing the amount of
Speaker 2: care that people had access to.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 12: Absolutely, And would to hear people talk about it now.
Speaker 12: I mean during a legislative committee, I think there was
Speaker 12: one representative or senator who said to take well, why
Speaker 12: did it take so long for this to get implemented?
Speaker 12: It was twenty twenty and twenty twenty one. Like people
Speaker 12: are quickly forgetting how chaotic things were that And the
Speaker 12: other thing is that when you put that money into
Speaker 12: the system, it takes a while to build beds, to
Speaker 12: hire people to do that. And what the opponents of
Speaker 12: one ten are doing, what the people seeking to recriminalize
Speaker 12: they're doing, and they're really praying on our collective impatience.
Speaker 10: You know.
Speaker 12: It's they're saying, oh, well, you know, nobody is going
Speaker 12: and voluntarily engaging in treatment. Therefore we must mandate it,
Speaker 12: and again, no one's voluntarily engaging in treatment because there's
Speaker 12: no treatment available to voluntarily engage in. And the idea
Speaker 12: that by making it criminal we can somehow fix that
Speaker 12: is actually counterproductive because we're taking all those funds that
Speaker 12: we could be putting into additional services into outreach, and
Speaker 12: we're instead putting it back into law enforcement or into probation,
Speaker 12: or into the jails or into the state lab to
Speaker 12: test these drugs.
Speaker 2: And I want to continue off of that, and I
Speaker 2: want to talk bring out some more data too, but
Speaker 2: first we have to go do a plug to ads.
Speaker 2: So here's ads, folks, all.
Speaker 3: Right, we are back.
Speaker 2: We're back, And I wanted to I think there's two
Speaker 2: really good things to keep in mind when as an
Speaker 2: Oregonian you're arguing with friends and family about one ten
Speaker 2: or if you're outside of the state and people bring
Speaker 2: it up because they saw like a three minute piece
Speaker 2: on Fox News where some smarmy asshole talk to a
Speaker 2: guy on the street, you know you should be aware
Speaker 2: of a couple of things. Number One, when people talk
Speaker 2: about how it's not working, the thing that you should
Speaker 2: bring up is like, well, what about the forty years
Speaker 2: or so of criminalization prior like that led us to
Speaker 2: this point and at which the acceleration in depths was highest.
Speaker 2: And the other thing to bring up is, well, there's
Speaker 2: these claims that, like public disorder, drug use, all this stuff,
Speaker 2: overdose deaths have gotten worse since one ten. There's no
Speaker 2: evidence that that's the case, right, And there was in
Speaker 2: fact a study into this by New York University that
Speaker 2: found no evidence of an association between decriminalization and fatal
Speaker 2: overdose rates in Oregon and Washington. And I want to
Speaker 2: read a couple of quotes from that study. So, first off, quote,
Speaker 2: publicly available calls for service data were used to compare
Speaker 2: Portland's use of the nine to one one system to Boise, Idaho, Sacramento, California,
Speaker 2: and Seattle, Washington, before and after one ten. This was
Speaker 2: between twenty eighteen and twenty twenty two. Public initiated calls
Speaker 2: for service did not change after BM one ten was
Speaker 2: enacted in Portland. Portland's nine one one calls for service
Speaker 2: data align with comparison cities for property, disorderly and vice
Speaker 2: offenses with similar seasonally fluctuations. So, for one thing, what
Speaker 2: you'll notice is that a lot of the articles about
Speaker 2: one ten started to hit both when we would have
Speaker 2: winter weather come in and summer weather come in. Both
Speaker 2: of those lead the surges in overdoses and drug use.
Speaker 2: Because the weather's shitty, right, people have less to do,
Speaker 2: less options, and actually, if you're living outside it's one
Speaker 2: hundred during the day or it's twelve, maybe you want
Speaker 2: to do drugs more because you're uncomfortable. Right. Yeah, So
Speaker 2: again I think that it's important. There's this study from
Speaker 2: New York University on one ten and you know, it's
Speaker 2: lack of impact on this stuff. That shouldn't be the
Speaker 2: final word on this. I'm certain there will be more studies,
Speaker 2: but that is a word on this, and they simply
Speaker 2: have no data.
Speaker 3: Well, on the other side of things.
Speaker 12: You know, there's another study as well. I mean, you know,
Speaker 12: there's a study out of Portland State University and it's interesting.
Speaker 12: It was a follow up study. The full report has
Speaker 12: not been released yet, but they did release some of
Speaker 12: their key findings and it was in the first year
Speaker 12: PSU met with officers and interviewed them about their perceptions
Speaker 12: of one ten and how it was going. As you
Speaker 12: might imagine, officers didn't think it was going well and
Speaker 12: they said, oh, well, violent crime has increased and property
Speaker 12: crime is increased in overdoses are increased in all because
Speaker 12: of one ten. And what this report found is that
Speaker 12: is not true. There was an uptick and property crime,
Speaker 12: but we cannot say that that has been a result
Speaker 12: of one ten for years. You need a lot of
Speaker 12: data in order to look at that. And so, you know,
Speaker 12: this idea, and I mean, the ultimate finding of that
Speaker 12: study was that it is too early to recriminalize. It
Speaker 12: based on the data, it is too early to recriminalize.
Speaker 12: And so but again, you know, I think that instead
Speaker 12: what we are relying on is people's fear and what
Speaker 12: people see in the street. And you know, I think
Speaker 12: it's also this idea. I mean, the reason we are
Speaker 12: having this discussion, in my opinion, is two things. One
Speaker 12: is public use, right, individuals using the street. It's in
Speaker 12: people's faces. Nobody really cares when someone is in the
Speaker 12: warmth of their own home using fentanyl. It's when they're
Speaker 12: on the street.
Speaker 2: Or I should note when someone's in the White House
Speaker 2: using fentanyl, because it just came out that the President
Speaker 2: and high staff were prescribed fentanyl and ketamine in the
Speaker 2: White House when Trump was in office.
Speaker 12: So yeah, absolutely, but no one really cares about that.
Speaker 12: It's when it's in your face that people care. And
Speaker 12: the other one is the perception that crime is. You
Speaker 12: know that again, a lot of crime is caused by
Speaker 12: drug use, right, there is an underlying association there. But
Speaker 12: the idea of criminalizing drugs because of that is the
Speaker 12: idea that you can somehow arrest somebody, compel them into
Speaker 12: treatment and therefore prevent crimes.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 12: I mean that's like the pre cog the sci fi
Speaker 12: sort of things. It's it is a backward system.
Speaker 2: No, and we actually know what will stop the drug
Speaker 2: related crimes, which are mostly theft, right, And one of
Speaker 2: the things that will and they've seen this, I believe
Speaker 2: it's the Netherlands that if you're a heroin addict, the
Speaker 2: government will give you free heroin. You have to take
Speaker 2: it at a center like you go in, you sign
Speaker 2: a thing and you get your dose and you take
Speaker 2: it there. That saves them money based on doing nothing,
Speaker 2: because when they do nothing, people break into houses and cars,
Speaker 2: et cetera, and boats because it's the Netherlands in order
Speaker 2: to steal shits so that they can not get dope sick,
Speaker 2: and just giving the dope to them winds up costing
Speaker 2: a lot less per addict.
Speaker 12: Well, the other thing that gets people clean or that
Speaker 12: stops people from committing crimes is housing, is providing them
Speaker 12: a roof over their head. I mean, when people are
Speaker 12: even if they're not on the street, if they are
Speaker 12: housing and stable, they're trying to make a living and
Speaker 12: it is not easy to do so with whether it's
Speaker 12: a felony record or you're you know, your upbringing or
Speaker 12: whatever reason has held you back. If they have housing.
Speaker 12: I mean, there are numerous studies that show that when
Speaker 12: you put somebody in housing, their likelihood of using drugs drops,
Speaker 12: their likelihood of committing crimes drops. And yet we are
Speaker 12: focused on this recriminalization rather than trying to house these individuals.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's you know, when you talk about this,
Speaker 2: when you talk about decriminalization in Oregon's context, there's a
Speaker 2: good reason for this. People talk about Portugal, Portugal, Spain
Speaker 2: also did this, both Portugal and Spain, and I believe
Speaker 2: Portugal's first decriminalized simple possession and use quite a while ago.
Speaker 2: It's been that way in Portugal for I think like
Speaker 2: twenty years. Like they have a significant amount of data
Speaker 2: on it right, and Oregonians, the people who were pushing
Speaker 2: for one ten, cited it specifically as like a reason
Speaker 2: why this was worthwhile. There was recently, I think last year,
Speaker 2: some state officials and whatnot went to Portugal to look
Speaker 2: into the system, and so as a result, you've seen
Speaker 2: like attacks on the Portuguese drug system, including there was
Speaker 2: a recent Washington Post article about how Portugal is starting
Speaker 2: to regret it, They're going to recriminalize maybe, And the
Speaker 2: reality of the situation is that there was has been
Speaker 2: a recent surge in illicit drug use in Portugal from
Speaker 2: seven point eight percent in two thousand and one to
Speaker 2: twelve point eight percent in twenty twenty two. That is
Speaker 2: an increase. It's still below the average in most of
Speaker 2: Western Europe. It's lower than France and Italy. I believe
Speaker 2: it's lower than the UK, It's lower than like most
Speaker 2: of Western Europe. And I just kind of pointing out
Speaker 2: the fact that Portugal is also dealing with an increase
Speaker 2: in drug use. Again, saying that that's because of the
Speaker 2: culture of decriminalization seems silly when there have been corresponding
Speaker 2: surges everywhere where it's illegal. But beyond that, it ignores
Speaker 2: the fact that there have been really significant benefits that
Speaker 2: we do know our benefits of decriminalization because of how
Speaker 2: long we've been looking at it. From two thousand to
Speaker 2: two thousand and eight, prison populations in Portugal fell by
Speaker 2: almost seventeen percent. Overdose rates dropped because in part they
Speaker 2: funded rehabilitation, which Oregon still has not really done. There
Speaker 2: was no surge in use, and in fact less people
Speaker 2: seem to die when the system changed, right. What has
Speaker 2: increased is some drug de related debris. Particularly most of
Speaker 2: the surges have been in the last literally the last
Speaker 2: couple of years, which again makes me think it is
Speaker 2: tied to the global trends that have made a lot
Speaker 2: of people more miserable and living in a more difficult
Speaker 2: situation and at more risk of drug addiction. What happens
Speaker 2: in Portugal politically hard to say, but overall, decriminalization we
Speaker 2: have a lot of data for seems to have largely
Speaker 2: been success.
Speaker 3: And if that's kind of.
Speaker 2: What we were to see in Oregon with decriminalization, I
Speaker 2: would be happy, even if there's more mess on the streets,
Speaker 2: although I don't think that that's inevitable. And this gets
Speaker 2: us to what I think is kind of the most
Speaker 2: dangerous point that the opposition, the people who want to
Speaker 2: recriminalize make, And it's dangerous because it seems like they
Speaker 2: have a good point, which is people shouldn't be people
Speaker 2: with families, just regular people should not have to see
Speaker 2: folks using hard drugs on the street as they walk
Speaker 2: around town. And I agree it is not reasonable to
Speaker 2: expect people to walk with their kids to school past
Speaker 2: somebody shooting up heroin or smoking crack. It's fine, and
Speaker 2: you're not like a some sort of like nark or
Speaker 2: party pooper if you don't want your kids to see that.
Speaker 2: But that's already illegal, because it's like it's illegal to
Speaker 2: drink a beer on the street in Portland. The problem
Speaker 2: is not that the cops can't do anything about it,
Speaker 2: it's that, again they're choosing not to do anything about it.
Speaker 12: Yeah, no, absolutely, I mean, and again it is the
Speaker 12: issue of we have people living on the streets, right,
Speaker 12: I mean, it is I completely agree that people shouldn't
Speaker 12: have to walk past that, but maybe that is an
Speaker 12: opportunity to talk to their child about the need to
Speaker 12: make sure that people have a safe place to live.
Speaker 12: And also, I mean it's also you know, if we
Speaker 12: had safe use locations, you wouldn't see nearly as much
Speaker 12: of that. And frankly, the system would have a better
Speaker 12: argument for punishing public use if we had safe use
Speaker 12: areas because we have put so many people on the street. Yes,
Speaker 12: somebody who has no place to be and is desperate
Speaker 12: and it is addicted using it a place where you
Speaker 12: can see them is understandable. Somebody who has options for
Speaker 12: places to be and is choosing to do it in
Speaker 12: front of people, that's a bit of a different case.
Speaker 12: And again I also want to just really, because I've
Speaker 12: encountered this in arguments about one ten with people. It
Speaker 12: did not make it legal to do drugs in public.
Speaker 12: That remains illegal. It's illegal to drink beer in public. Absolutely, Yeah,
Speaker 12: public use is I mean, but again, these are sort
Speaker 12: of the narratives that are being perpetuated by and a
Speaker 12: lot of it is law enforcement. And honestly, my take
Speaker 12: on it is that law enforcement doesn't really care about
Speaker 12: recriminalizing possession.
Speaker 3: They don't.
Speaker 12: What they want is they want the ability to search people.
Speaker 12: What that gives them is it gives them the right
Speaker 12: to say, hey, I have problem cause to believe that
Speaker 12: you have drugs on you therefore I'm gonna search you,
Speaker 12: I'm gonna search your car, I'm going to search your house. Right,
Speaker 12: it gives them that ability, and they, you know, many
Speaker 12: of them, will be very forthright about that. And the
Speaker 12: biggest infringements on our personal privacy, on our Fourth Amendment rights,
Speaker 12: on our protected privacy interest has always been drugs. It
Speaker 12: has always been the criminalization of drugs has eroded our
Speaker 12: privacy interests. And and that is that's what's really at
Speaker 12: play here because I don't I don't think the officers
Speaker 12: I mean, and this is again not a monolith I'm saying,
Speaker 12: I don't think in general law enforcement really is that
Speaker 12: concerned with, you know, getting individuals off the street and
Speaker 12: into treatment. If that were the case, we would have
Speaker 12: seen far more of those e citations, you know, we
Speaker 12: would see the officers doing there. There is a statute
Speaker 12: that allows them to transport people to detox, right, we
Speaker 12: don't see that that often because really, what is that
Speaker 12: issue here is the ability to search people based on
Speaker 12: probable cause that they possess drugs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and we will we will talk about what
Speaker 2: people can do if they want to stop the recriminalization
Speaker 2: of drugs in Oregon.
Speaker 3: But first, here's some more ads. We're back, So grant.
Speaker 2: Kind of the question I am left with at the
Speaker 2: end of this here is what do we do to
Speaker 2: fight back against this?
Speaker 3: What is actually what is go? What are the options
Speaker 3: people have?
Speaker 2: Obviously the thing that first occurs to me that is
Speaker 2: most successible is make a fuss to your elected leaders
Speaker 2: so you know that this is something you'll think about
Speaker 2: come vote in season.
Speaker 3: But first off, how would people do that?
Speaker 12: I guess yeah, I mean, you know, figure out who
Speaker 12: your legislator is, you know, write to them, call them,
Speaker 12: let them know that you know you want to see,
Speaker 12: you know, realistic fixes to this. You want to see
Speaker 12: investment in public health, in outreach through pure navigators and
Speaker 12: case managers that you don't want to see us return
Speaker 12: to the same war on drugs that has failed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's hard, I will say if you're looking
Speaker 2: to do research outside of like a lot of a
Speaker 2: lot of local news, this is a hard time for
Speaker 2: local news. Well, good local reporting gets done in a
Speaker 2: number of places, including Oregon. Also, a lot of smaller
Speaker 2: local news agencies are very much in the pocket of
Speaker 2: the people who helped to fund them, which is some
Speaker 2: of the people funding the attempt to repeal. So if
Speaker 2: one of the better articles that has been written recently
Speaker 2: was in the New Yorker, it's great. Yeah, there's a
Speaker 2: I'm pulling it up right now. There's a great New
Speaker 2: Yorker piece, a New Drug War in Oregon, that was
Speaker 2: published just this month, probably the best major outlet piece
Speaker 2: I've seen on it, And yeah, it's It talks a
Speaker 2: lot about the STAB and Wagon, which is a kind
Speaker 2: of independent although they've now should at some point theoretically
Speaker 2: be getting a significant amount of funding, but like they
Speaker 2: provide drug users not just with naloxone or narcan, but
Speaker 2: with safe use materials like syringes and stuff that are clean.
Speaker 2: This is down in the south of Oregon, in a
Speaker 2: place called Medford, which has both one of Oregon's worst
Speaker 2: drug problems and also is much more conservative area. So
Speaker 2: obviously these people are very controversial, and I will say,
Speaker 2: you know, one of the things this article does well
Speaker 2: is they get at, even within people who are supportive
Speaker 2: of one ten, the conflict between kind of traditional addiction
Speaker 2: recovery resources and organizations and some of these often these
Speaker 2: new organizations are either started by or run by people
Speaker 2: who have or do currently deal with addiction, and I
Speaker 2: think covering that conflict is valuable. There's some stuff that
Speaker 2: frustrates me about it, and this is I think there's
Speaker 2: a lot of negativity towards stab and Wagon and its
Speaker 2: founder that's unfair. I also think some of the things
Speaker 2: that she has said about traditional addiction recovery resources are
Speaker 2: very unfair from her point of view. And I think
Speaker 2: when I look at the problem, the only comprehensive solution
Speaker 2: is multiple options for different kinds of people. Because I
Speaker 2: know a lot of people who have dealt with addiction
Speaker 2: and recovered and no two of them did it the
Speaker 2: same way.
Speaker 12: Yeah, no, absolutely, And I mean I think that you know,
Speaker 12: both of those are necessary, right harm. What I always
Speaker 12: say is that the beauty of armyedduction is that not
Speaker 12: only does it ensure that somebody survives long enough to
Speaker 12: make it to recovery, but it also builds a relationship
Speaker 12: with that person. It builds a relationship of trust so
Speaker 12: that you can have a conversation about the need for recovery.
Speaker 12: You know, as a public defender, I don't get the
Speaker 12: benefit of the prosecutor or the court to or probation
Speaker 12: to wield power and to make my client do what
Speaker 12: they should do. Because I'm holding power over them. I
Speaker 12: have to build trust, right, I have to have a
Speaker 12: relationship of trust with them, and I have to find
Speaker 12: out what motivates that individual and and try to utilize
Speaker 12: that to encourage positive steps. Right, And that's true of
Speaker 12: our our case managers and social workers that work with us.
Speaker 12: And that's that's what the system doesn't have, right. The
Speaker 12: system is just trying to use the threat of incarceration
Speaker 12: in order to get individuals who are not ready for
Speaker 12: recovery to engage in recovery, and that that's detrimental. I mean,
Speaker 12: we need both harm reduction and we need traditional treatment.
Speaker 12: We need culturally competent treatment. You know, there needs to
Speaker 12: be wrap around services. And that's one of my concerns
Speaker 12: here is that you know, we know that the criminal
Speaker 12: legal system has worked. One ten past, we had a
Speaker 12: drug court that dealt with low level possession and its
Speaker 12: graduation rate was around seventeen percent, so seventeen percent to people,
Speaker 12: and graduation meant ninety days of sobriety. And that was
Speaker 12: seventeen percent of people. That other eighty three percent if
Speaker 12: they fail out a program. Again, the only tool the
Speaker 12: system has is jail, and so all they did was
Speaker 12: did not hook them up with services and instead eventually
Speaker 12: punish them for not being ready for treatment, and that
Speaker 12: is not how we get people into recovery.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that that's a really good point when
Speaker 2: I when I talk about both how people can help
Speaker 2: if a loved one is starting to do with drug
Speaker 2: addiction and when someone if someone you love is getting
Speaker 2: into a cult or getting pulled into conspiracy theories, it's
Speaker 2: actually the same advice. I had a friend come to
Speaker 2: me recently because I loved one of theirs was starting
Speaker 2: to kind of talk about some really concerning conspiracy theory stuff, right,
Speaker 2: and they were like, what do I say against this?
Speaker 2: How do I argue against it? And my answer was like, well,
Speaker 2: you don't really You make it clear, like, hey, I
Speaker 2: don't really believe this, I don't find this compelling, but
Speaker 2: like you know, I love you and I'm always here
Speaker 2: to listen if you want to talk about this kind
Speaker 2: of stuff or you want to talk about whatever. And
Speaker 2: that is the same if someone's starting to get pulled
Speaker 2: into a cult or if they're dealing with drugs, because,
Speaker 2: as you noted, if they have a pathway out, and
Speaker 2: they're not going to have to It's not this kind
Speaker 2: of thing where you've been yelling at them and may
Speaker 2: and then they they have to come to you with
Speaker 2: their head tail between their legs and like I was wrong,
Speaker 2: I fucked up. That's a barrier. If like, well, this
Speaker 2: this person cares about me and is always going to
Speaker 2: be like willing to you know, talk with me like
Speaker 2: no matter what, well, then that's less of a barrier.
Speaker 3: Then you're not.
Speaker 2: You haven't built a wall that they have to get through.
Speaker 2: They can just come to you when they're like I
Speaker 2: need help exactly. I mean, it's based in relationships, and
Speaker 2: I mean that's that's one of the issues, right, is
Speaker 2: that too many people, not just Importland but everywhere, see
Speaker 2: individuals on the street and assume the worst and see
Speaker 2: them as the other. They don't see them as part
Speaker 2: of the community, and so they're more than fine with
Speaker 2: a system locking them up because of their addiction. And
Speaker 2: you know, we all need to recognize that, you know
Speaker 2: it that falling into that lifestyle. You know, whether whether
Speaker 2: it is because of you know, where you were raised,
Speaker 2: how you were raised, you know, whether you got addicted
Speaker 2: to pills because your doctor prescribed them. There's a lot
Speaker 2: of reasons, whether you had childhood trauma, there's a lot
Speaker 2: of reasons why people get an addiction. And you know,
Speaker 2: to simply assume that somebody, because they're addicted to drugs
Speaker 2: is a criminal, a bad person, you know, it is
Speaker 2: making them the other. And it's so much easier to
Speaker 2: be punitive when you're just seeing.
Speaker 12: That person as the other.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I did want to note if people are
Speaker 2: looking for resources online both about one ten and how
Speaker 2: they can help in the fight to stop it from
Speaker 2: getting repealed, you can go to h JR, the Health
Speaker 2: Justice Recovery Alliance. They have you can sign up to
Speaker 2: get information from them. They have community resources, they have
Speaker 2: like updates on what's going on. I think you can
Speaker 2: find through them a way to like automatically kind of
Speaker 2: send a form message.
Speaker 3: To your elected leaders.
Speaker 2: So just google Health Justice Recovery Alliance Oregon or Health
Speaker 2: Justice Recovery Alliance one ten and that will take you there.
Speaker 2: They've got a lot of stuff collected there, both resources
Speaker 2: if you're having arguments with people about this and information
Speaker 2: on how you can help at least try to do something.
Speaker 12: Yeah, and I will say all so the ACLU has
Speaker 12: been very active in this as well, and you know,
Speaker 12: they have an action plan on their website that you know,
Speaker 12: tells you some of the things that you can do
Speaker 12: in this and and you know, like I said, I mean,
Speaker 12: I I think obviously contacting your legislators where we haven't
Speaker 12: even started the legislation or the legislative session yet, and
Speaker 12: so there is still room to change this and to
Speaker 12: at least make it less bad, which you know it's
Speaker 12: these days sometimes it feels like less bad is the
Speaker 12: is the goal that we need to strive for.
Speaker 3: It's harm reduction.
Speaker 2: Again, That's how I tend to look at the legislative
Speaker 2: side of things. Well, everybody that's going to do it
Speaker 2: for us here at it could happen here, Grant, thank
Speaker 2: you so much. Should you have anything you wanted to
Speaker 2: plug your direct listeners towards before we roll out here?
Speaker 12: I mean, I think again, it's just you know, go
Speaker 12: to the ACLU website, go to hha's website, get involved.
Speaker 12: But more than just that, no matter what happens during
Speaker 12: this legislative session, you know, remember that all of these
Speaker 12: folks on the street are people, and they need assistance,
Speaker 12: and you know, and they need help and continue, or
Speaker 12: consider you know, contributing to a recovery organization, or volunteering
Speaker 12: to go out into the community. You know, if you
Speaker 12: have lived experience with addiction, consider becoming a peer. It
Speaker 12: is so impactful to have individuals who have struggled with
Speaker 12: substance use go out in the community and engage individuals
Speaker 12: who are currently struggling with it. And that is the
Speaker 12: best trust building that it's the best way to get
Speaker 12: people into recovery, not through handcuffs in jails.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much, Grant. I couldn't agree more. All Right, everybody,
Speaker 2: that's it for us today. We'll be back tomorrow with
Speaker 2: more of it happening here.
Speaker 13: Welcome to it could happen here on Garrison Davis.
Speaker 10: Now.
Speaker 13: Last week I spent a few days in Las Vegas
Speaker 13: for the Consumer Electronics Showcase. Most of the time of
Speaker 13: the convention, I was just walking around the show floor
Speaker 13: looking at various new types of surveillance equipment, AI products,
Speaker 13: and various other bullshit that was being pedled to many
Speaker 13: industry attendees of CEES. But I was also able to
Speaker 13: go to a few panels. Now, panels are really interesting
Speaker 13: because you get to hear people who are working inside
Speaker 13: industries talk about stuff that they don't usually really publicly
Speaker 13: talk about very much. And on the first day of
Speaker 13: the convention, I went to a panel about drone technology.
Speaker 13: Half of the panel was about how Walmart is launching
Speaker 13: new delivery drones in Dallas, Texas. The other half was
Speaker 13: about police drones. And that's what we're going to be
Speaker 13: talking about here today, how the police are using drones,
Speaker 13: why they're using drones, and how you can probably expect
Speaker 13: to be seeing a lot more drones up in the
Speaker 13: sky piloted by either an AI or a police officer.
Speaker 13: So let's get started. Cheula Vista is the southernmost kind
Speaker 13: of medium sized city in California, with the population of
Speaker 13: two hundred and seventy eight thousand people. Cheulavista has a
Speaker 13: police force of two hundred and eighty nine sworn officers,
Speaker 13: as well as one hundred and twenty civilian employees. On
Speaker 13: top of their nearly three hundred officers, they operate a
Speaker 13: drone fleet ten hours a day, seven days a week,
Speaker 13: launching high deff camera mounted drones from four locations throughout
Speaker 13: their small city. I'm going to quote from an article
Speaker 13: from the MIT Technology Review, which did a deep dive
Speaker 13: onto Cheulavista's police drones back in February of twenty twenty three.
Speaker 4: Quote.
Speaker 13: Cheulavista uses these drones to extend the power of its
Speaker 13: workforce in a number of ways. For example, if only
Speaker 13: one officer is available when two calls come in, one
Speaker 13: or an armed suspect and another for shoplifting, an officer
Speaker 13: will respond to the first one. But now cvpd's Public
Speaker 13: Information Officer, Sergeant Anthony Molina, says that dispatchers can send
Speaker 13: a drone to surreptitiously trail the suspected shoplifter quote, and
Speaker 13: this really gets at the heart of how these drones
Speaker 13: are going to get used. They exist to funnel more
Speaker 13: people into the criminal justice system. Instead of having to
Speaker 13: choose between two calls, one of which actually could relate
Speaker 13: to saving someone's life, the other just a petty crime,
Speaker 13: now the police can easily follow someone doing a petty
Speaker 13: crime while responding to other calls and eventually catch up.
Speaker 13: It's a way to just expand the amount of people
Speaker 13: that can be arrested and thrown into jail. Nowadays, drones
Speaker 13: are pretty common.
Speaker 4: Tools for police.
Speaker 13: Over one thy five hundred departments currently use drones, usually
Speaker 13: for special occasions though, like search and rescue, crime scene documentation,
Speaker 13: protest surveillance, and sometimes tracking suspects, but at the moment,
Speaker 13: only about a dozen police departments regularly dispatched drones in
Speaker 13: response to nine to one one calls, the first of
Speaker 13: which was Chew La Vista PD, who launched their quote
Speaker 13: drone as first Responder program back in twenty eighteen with
Speaker 13: the goal of having an unmanned aerial system or drone
Speaker 13: be proactively deployed before an officer is on scene. Now
Speaker 13: we'll hear from Chief Roxanna Kennedy of the Cheu La
Speaker 13: Vista Police Department talking on the drone technology panel at CES.
Speaker 10: We are seven miles from the Mexico border, and we
Speaker 10: have the second largest city in San Diego County. So
Speaker 10: we have about two hundred and ninety officers and we
Speaker 10: serve a community of about three hundred thousand. Because of
Speaker 10: the close proximity to the door, we have a lot
Speaker 10: of people that have traveled back and forth.
Speaker 7: We have a drone program that I'm awfully proud of.
Speaker 10: And we are responding proactive lead to calls for service
Speaker 10: in our community.
Speaker 7: And so we have drone station.
Speaker 10: From four different locations throughout our city. We have pilots
Speaker 10: in command that are on the rooftop, and then we
Speaker 10: have a operation center where we have sworn officers that
Speaker 10: are part one to seven pilots.
Speaker 7: That fly the drones. So we are responding now to
Speaker 7: calls for service on average, and.
Speaker 10: An officer on scene, a drone pendant on scene that's
Speaker 10: sharing information with our officers lights streaming that information on
Speaker 10: our cell phones or in our computers that we're seeing
Speaker 10: information about the call within.
Speaker 7: Ninety seconds on average.
Speaker 10: And so what it's doing for us in sure Vista
Speaker 10: and for our community is we are providing information rapidly,
Speaker 10: real time information to officers so that they can make
Speaker 10: better decisions so that everyone goes home safely. We say,
Speaker 10: the community safer, the officers are safer, and the subjects
Speaker 10: that we encounter are safer.
Speaker 7: So we're offly proud of what we're doing.
Speaker 13: The way police are able to deploy drone used to
Speaker 13: be a lot more limited. The use of drones is
Speaker 13: regulated by the FFA, the Federal Aviation Administration. In most cases,
Speaker 13: the FFA requires that both hobbyists and police departments only
Speaker 13: fly drones within the operator's own line of sight. But
Speaker 13: starting back in twenty nineteen, agencies and vendors could start
Speaker 13: applying for a beyond visual line of sight or BEVLOSS
Speaker 13: waiver from the FFA to fly drones remotely, allowing for
Speaker 13: much longer flights in restricted airspace. Chula Vista Pedi was
Speaker 13: the first department to get a BEVLOST waiver. The MIT
Speaker 13: Tech Review estimated last year that roughly two hundred and
Speaker 13: twenty five more departments now have one as well.
Speaker 7: Another thing that I.
Speaker 10: Always talk about because I think it's critical, is the
Speaker 10: concept of why they're using drones, what the benefit is
Speaker 10: to the community with the use of our drones. And
Speaker 10: I truly believe that when my officers can pick up
Speaker 10: their cellf up before they even respond to the call,
Speaker 10: and they can look and see the scene.
Speaker 7: What's happening where the individual is.
Speaker 10: If the person's facing in the middle of the park,
Speaker 10: there are no children around, and there are noo there's
Speaker 10: nobody that's within the reach of this individual harmy, you
Speaker 10: might not have to rush into that scene so quickly
Speaker 10: officers can d escalate, make better decisions. And I mean
Speaker 10: this is just a game changer for law enforcement and
Speaker 10: right now, you know, we were the first agent agency
Speaker 10: to be involved in the integrated Pilot program with the FAA.
Speaker 10: We're very proud of that that they trusted us enough
Speaker 10: for us to be the organization that brought forward all
Speaker 10: these these ideas that are now being utilized in law enforcements. Now.
Speaker 13: I've watched a lot of videos of police talking about
Speaker 13: why they're using drones, of drone training companies talking about
Speaker 13: why police drones are so important. In one video on
Speaker 13: their website, this guy from Skyfire Consulting was talking about
Speaker 13: how police may not have had to kill Ta Mirror
Speaker 13: Rice if they simply had a drone watching beforehand so
Speaker 13: they could see that it was a toy gun, which
Speaker 13: is a ridiculous thing to say, because in the nine
Speaker 13: one one call that jump started this entire police interaction,
Speaker 13: it was expressed that the caller thought the gun was
Speaker 13: probably a toy. And this notion that is simply if
Speaker 13: police have more ability to surveil, they'll be able to
Speaker 13: respond safer and apply less deadly force, I think is
Speaker 13: a pretty suspect premise. Now, the effectiveness of drone technology
Speaker 13: and law enforcement is challenging to verify and quantify. The
Speaker 13: MIT Tech Review cannot find any third party studies showing
Speaker 13: that drones reduce crime, even after interviewing CVPD officers as
Speaker 13: well as drone vendors and researchers quote, nor could anyone
Speaker 13: provide statistics on how many additional arrests or convictions came
Speaker 13: from using drone technology. I was able to find some
Speaker 13: data on cvpd's website talking about how many drone initiated
Speaker 13: interactions resulted in arrests, but quantifying additional arrests seems to
Speaker 13: be a little challenging.
Speaker 10: Now.
Speaker 13: If you look at Cheulavista PD's own drone responses stats,
Speaker 13: the vast majority of deployments I estimate around seventy percent
Speaker 13: are for what the director of investigations for the privacy
Speaker 13: rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation refers to as quote
Speaker 13: crimes of poverty unquote, which he believes will be the
Speaker 13: target of most drone policing as opposed to violent crime.
Speaker 13: Nearly thirty percent of Chula Vista's drone deployments are for
Speaker 13: what's categorized as disturbances, Almost fifteen percent are for psychological evaluations,
Speaker 13: ten percent are for quote, check the area and information.
Speaker 13: Over seven percent are for welfare checks, six point five
Speaker 13: percent is for quote unknown problem, and over six percent
Speaker 13: is for suspicious person and another six percent for traffic accidents. Now,
Speaker 13: some drone of deployments do results in patrol units not
Speaker 13: having to be dispatched, but CVPD also says that drones
Speaker 13: have assisted in thousands of arrests. And I'm really not
Speaker 13: sure if having a drone following someone around is the
Speaker 13: best thing for a fifty one to fifty psych evaluation.
Speaker 13: The presidence of a police officer doesn't always make the
Speaker 13: situations better either, but I don't see having a drone
Speaker 13: be a really calming presence if you think someone needs
Speaker 13: mental help. Funding a whole fleet of heavy duty surveillance
Speaker 13: drones and paying dedicated operators costs money. Now it's unclear
Speaker 13: to me how many drones to LEVISTAPD currently has, and
Speaker 13: on their website they list ten different drone models currently
Speaker 13: being in their fleet, most of them really expensive DGI
Speaker 13: drones like the DGI Matrix, the DGI Inspire, the DGA Phantom,
Speaker 13: the dj Maverick, as well as drones from a few
Speaker 13: other random companies. But nevertheless, Chief Kennedy is very grateful
Speaker 13: for their local Police Foundation for heading up the funding
Speaker 13: for their DFR drone first Responder program. Let's hear from her.
Speaker 7: I don't know if anyone here is in.
Speaker 10: Law enforcement, but many agencies use drunes and there are
Speaker 10: all different types of drones that are available.
Speaker 7: I call them reactive drums.
Speaker 10: Or ones that are like the tactical drones that you
Speaker 10: can use to go in on a hostage situation or
Speaker 10: a missing person to check in the.
Speaker 7: Canyon areas, or you know, interior drones.
Speaker 10: We have drunes that grow underneath bands, go inside addicts,
Speaker 10: all types of different drones, and many organizations have drones
Speaker 10: like that, but a DFR drone is very unique and
Speaker 10: different because these drones are flying as you can imagine
Speaker 10: ten thousand missions. It puts a lot of wear and
Speaker 10: tear on them. But that is one of the biggest
Speaker 10: challenges beyond that of funding. So we don't have huge
Speaker 10: budgets that are abouted for drone programs, and so we've
Speaker 10: had to be very, very creative at our police department,
Speaker 10: and we were very blessed to have a police foundation
Speaker 10: that has taken on the responsibility to help us really
Speaker 10: start our drone program and continue going forward. So funding
Speaker 10: is always going to be a challenge and dependent upon the.
Speaker 7: Drone that you use.
Speaker 10: There are some drones that you can't get any as.
Speaker 10: You can't use for assets seizure funding, nor can you
Speaker 10: get grants for because sometimes when it comes to foreign
Speaker 10: may drones there are many challenges as well. So you
Speaker 10: have to think of that and then we deal with legislation.
Speaker 10: Right now, that's the new challenge staff we all have.
Speaker 10: We have to bite some valves. I'm like I said,
Speaker 10: I'm agnostic. I want to use what's the best drum
Speaker 10: out there and protect the inform and we do that
Speaker 10: with encrypted software programs that are on private servers. But
Speaker 10: you'll see that there's a lot of discussion about drones
Speaker 10: and what drones we.
Speaker 7: Should be using right now.
Speaker 13: We'll get back to the chief's offhanded mention of legal
Speaker 13: battles in a bit here, But Chula Vista's budgetary situation
Speaker 13: may not be as dire as the chief makes it
Speaker 13: out to be. On top of their current fifty five
Speaker 13: million dollar operating budget. Back in twenty twenty, the Loprenza
Speaker 13: newspaper revealed that departments in San Diego County had secretly
Speaker 13: been getting hundreds of millions of dollars in high tech
Speaker 13: police equipment, including armored vehicles, facial recognition and phone breaking software,
Speaker 13: license plate readers, drones, ria gear, among other miscellaneous technology
Speaker 13: as a part of a DHS grant program due to
Speaker 13: their close proximity to the US Mexico border. Chula Vista
Speaker 13: was one such department, and as of twenty twenty, so
Speaker 13: four years ago, they had already received over one million
Speaker 13: dollars in grant funds from this DHS program, titled the
Speaker 13: quote Urban Area Security Initiative. Considering Chief Kennedy's budgetary concerns,
Speaker 13: drones actually have a lot of upsides financially, as they
Speaker 13: are often a lot cheaper than alternative surveillance methods, as
Speaker 13: well as being relatively easy to deploy remotely, either with
Speaker 13: a joystick or just by clicking a point on a
Speaker 13: map from a comfy office building. Issues around this ease
Speaker 13: of use was pointed out by Dave Moss, the director
Speaker 13: of investigations for the privacy rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
Speaker 13: who was quoted in the MIT article saying, quote, up
Speaker 13: until the last like five to ten years, there was
Speaker 13: this unspoken check and balance on law enforcement power, money
Speaker 13: You cannot have a police officer standing on every corner
Speaker 13: of every street. You can't have a helicopter flying twenty
Speaker 13: four seven because of fuel and insurance is really expensive.
Speaker 13: But with all these new technologies, we don't have that
Speaker 13: check and balance anymore. That's just going to result in
Speaker 13: more people being pulled through the criminal justice system.
Speaker 10: My officers constantly are on the air now is UAS
Speaker 10: one available? Is UAS one available? Because it's getting them
Speaker 10: more information. Think about the fact that you can look
Speaker 10: at your cell phone. I could be anywhere in the
Speaker 10: world and I can look at kit lets me know
Speaker 10: whenever there's a drone fly, and I can walk, I
Speaker 10: can have visual awareness, aial overlay of what's happening in
Speaker 10: my community.
Speaker 7: No matter where I am.
Speaker 13: Advancements in technology are leading to further normalization of police surveillance.
Speaker 13: Ten years ago, would people react to news of a
Speaker 13: twenty four hour police drone program the same way they
Speaker 13: would now? What was once the threat of Big Brother
Speaker 13: has since become a very sought after, unfetishized nanny state.
Speaker 13: In the v for Veneta graphic novel, anarchist writer Alan
Speaker 13: Moore imagined a fascist Britain characterized by surveillance cameras around
Speaker 13: every corner, and now cities around the country are setting
Speaker 13: up their own street mounted cameras linked to private security
Speaker 13: cameras and ring doorbell cameras to create a network of
Speaker 13: life coverage around a whole city which is instantly accessible
Speaker 13: to police. The more widespread consumer adoption of new technologies
Speaker 13: like small camera mounted drones and doorbell cameras, the more
Speaker 13: acceptable it seems for police to add such technology to
Speaker 13: their arsenal of surveillance tools. It almost becomes expected to
Speaker 13: LAVISTIPEDI has routinely declined to answer why their drones are
Speaker 13: always recording, both to and from the scene, and the
Speaker 13: department has put in a lot of effort into managing
Speaker 13: the backlash against their expanding drone program.
Speaker 7: And I'll tell you one thing.
Speaker 10: Even some of the after this, they were very concerned
Speaker 10: about drones in the sense of privacy.
Speaker 7: What are you doing with these drones?
Speaker 10: As you're responding, you're trying to gather data and information
Speaker 10: and de spy on us, right, And we have had
Speaker 10: to go to a lot of detail and explaining that
Speaker 10: as our.
Speaker 7: Drone lifts off, it is immediately it is recording, because
Speaker 7: that's the information gatherer for us. As that drone responds.
Speaker 10: The camera is already going almost three miles down the
Speaker 10: roads where the scene is and giving us vital information
Speaker 10: as the officers are responding. But one of the criticism was,
Speaker 10: go on the way back, is your drone just going
Speaker 10: in my backyard? What if we're spoking marijuana in our backyard?
Speaker 10: And I said, you're in California, it doesn't really matter
Speaker 10: about way.
Speaker 3: Let that way go right.
Speaker 7: But we said, okay, we gave you your concern, and
Speaker 7: so what we did was we worked with the.
Speaker 10: Software company that we were with and they created an
Speaker 10: automatic so that as a drone returns, it automatically tilts
Speaker 10: to the horizon, so we're not recording anything. If another
Speaker 10: call came out, we can immediately we'll go back in
Speaker 10: it or flight map it for us to share that
Speaker 10: information later on. But the goal is to listen to
Speaker 10: your community as well.
Speaker 13: Chief Kennedy's claim here is difficult to back up because
Speaker 13: CVPD have refused to show the public any of the
Speaker 13: drone footage they routinely collect. But if we take the
Speaker 13: Chief at her word here anyway, she admits that the
Speaker 13: drone goes back to recording at street level as soon
Speaker 13: as there's another nine one one call, as they record
Speaker 13: everything on the way to a scene. And the way
Speaker 13: she phrases this whole tilt feature is quite misleading because
Speaker 13: the camera never actually stops recording. She just claims that
Speaker 13: it tilts slightly upwards in between nine one one calls,
Speaker 13: but it's still capturing footage up to three miles away
Speaker 13: the entire time it's in the air. Police in Cheulavista
Speaker 13: have flown over eighteen thousand missions with their drowns. That's
Speaker 13: a lot of footage. When talking about the privacy concerns
Speaker 13: had by some residents of Chewulavista, Chief Kennedy really emphasized
Speaker 13: how much her in the department really care about listening
Speaker 13: to community feedback and how data transparency is so important
Speaker 13: to CVPD.
Speaker 10: Community engagement is essential, especially in law enforcement, because there
Speaker 10: is there are so many challenges when it comes to
Speaker 10: misinformation that's out there, and whenever you're a part of
Speaker 10: what's deemed as a government, everyone thinks that you have
Speaker 10: some ulterior motive when you're involved with any type of technology,
Speaker 10: and so we have worked really hard to build very
Speaker 10: strong relationships with every aspect of our community. So it
Speaker 10: was about in twenty fifteen when we started talking about
Speaker 10: the concept and the possibility of drones. And I laughed
Speaker 10: with Chancel, said George Jensen, because that's my story that
Speaker 10: I used to and I love it.
Speaker 7: Because I made fun of my guys.
Speaker 10: When they said that we want to fly drunes. I said, oh,
Speaker 10: come on, now, what are we bet George jetson flying
Speaker 10: around the cars? And then I saw today they talked
Speaker 10: about a blind car.
Speaker 7: So it happens. It happens, all right. And so with
Speaker 7: the community, we.
Speaker 10: Started having these conversations. We created a working group, we
Speaker 10: started doing community forums. We started asking the community about
Speaker 10: what would you think if we were able to do
Speaker 10: something like this. We even went to some of the
Speaker 10: organizations that may not always be so supportive of these
Speaker 10: types of groups. We worked with the ASL you and
Speaker 10: ask for their input on our policy. So before we
Speaker 10: ever flew a drone, we call it the krawl.
Speaker 7: Lolock run phase.
Speaker 10: We're still at the very end of crawl, we're not
Speaker 10: into lock yet and we've been doing it again also
Speaker 10: for five years. So you have to make certain that
Speaker 10: you're transparent, and we provided all types of information that
Speaker 10: are available.
Speaker 7: If you go to all you have put in is
Speaker 7: Jovis to place.
Speaker 10: Drums and it'll come up with us and you can
Speaker 10: look at all the things that we do, all the
Speaker 10: information that we share, the flight maps that we share.
Speaker 7: I mean, it's just super important to have those forums.
Speaker 7: Every year.
Speaker 10: We do a community forum twice a year where we
Speaker 10: ask for input from our community.
Speaker 13: Later on in the panel, Chief Kennedy said that CVPD
Speaker 13: is quote unquote extremely transparent about their flight data and
Speaker 13: quote unquote have nothing to hide relating to their use
Speaker 13: of surveillance drones, which is a curious claim considering the
Speaker 13: fact that CVPD has historically kept all drone footage hidden
Speaker 13: from the public and has fought in court to do so.
Speaker 13: Despite the chief's emphasis on the police's commitment to transparency
Speaker 13: and the importance of listening to community feedback, even going
Speaker 13: as far as to consult the ACLU when developing their
Speaker 13: drone program, for years now, the Cheu Livista Police Department
Speaker 13: has denied all FOYA and public records requests for any
Speaker 13: drone footage in response. Are Turno Castnares, a Teulvista resident
Speaker 13: and owner of the local bilingual newspaper Loprenza filed a
Speaker 13: lawsuit against the city. CVPD argued that all drone footage
Speaker 13: should be categorically exempt from the public records requests on
Speaker 13: the basis that the footage could be used for a
Speaker 13: future investigation. Just last December, only a few weeks before Cees,
Speaker 13: the California Fourth District Court of Appeals ruled that this
Speaker 13: blanket exemption is invalid and that not all drone first
Speaker 13: responder footage could be classified as part of appending or
Speaker 13: ongoing criminal investigation, pointing to examples such as nine oh
Speaker 13: one calls about a roaming mountain lion or a stranded motorist.
Speaker 13: And police were not happy about this ruling. I'll talk
Speaker 13: about their reaction at the end of the episode, but
Speaker 13: controlling the narrative about the drone first responder program has
Speaker 13: been of the utmost importance to Trulavista Police, as the
Speaker 13: chief herself expressed at the panel.
Speaker 7: And we're real good about telling our story.
Speaker 10: If you don't tell your own story in law enforcement,
Speaker 10: other people will tell it for it and it might
Speaker 10: not be the right story. So we've gotten really good
Speaker 10: at sharing on our social media and through YouTube channels
Speaker 10: and everything.
Speaker 7: Success stories of what we're doing.
Speaker 13: That is quite the claim there, to paraphrase the Electronic
Speaker 13: Frontier Foundation. Without public access to their drone footage, it
Speaker 13: makes it very difficult to assess how much privacy you
Speaker 13: have in Cheula Vista and whether police are even following
Speaker 13: their own rules about when and whether they record sensitive
Speaker 13: places like people's homes, backyards, or public protests. And that's
Speaker 13: why this recent ruling and the legal precedent it sets
Speaker 13: is a huge win for actual transparency and marks the
Speaker 13: first step towards the public finally getting a look at
Speaker 13: how these drones are being used in Scheula Vista. With
Speaker 13: drone first responder programs is spreading to police departments across
Speaker 13: the country modeled after the one in Chula Vesta. Combined
Speaker 13: with the increasing presence of stationary street level cameras, the
Speaker 13: ability for police to be watching everywhere without the need
Speaker 13: for on the ground officers creates what the EFF refers
Speaker 13: to as quote, a fundamental change in strategy, with police
Speaker 13: responding to a much much larger number of situations with drones,
Speaker 13: resulting in pervasive, if not persistent, surveillance of communities unquote.
Speaker 13: Speaking of persistent surveillance, Near the end of the panel,
Speaker 13: the Chief announced that to Lavesta, PD is planning to
Speaker 13: expand their ten hour a day drone first responder program
Speaker 13: to a constant twenty four hour a day drone surveillance program.
Speaker 13: More than doubling the department's capacity to have eyes in
Speaker 13: the sky would mean a lot more work hours for
Speaker 13: drone operators, as well as a large increase in the
Speaker 13: amount of video files being stored indefinitely, but Chief Kennedy
Speaker 13: claimed that they're looking into offsetting costs by replacing some
Speaker 13: of the drone piloting team with AI assisted piloting and
Speaker 13: autonomous devices.
Speaker 9: You've clearly been the leader with thrones's first responder technology.
Speaker 9: Looking forward, what is the future hole for the department?
Speaker 9: I assume you're spending a lot of time telling others
Speaker 9: about the program edition using drones, but beyond that, what's up.
Speaker 10: Well, my hope is that we'll be moving towards twenty
Speaker 10: four hour operations. Right now, we're from sunrise to sunset.
Speaker 10: We go untill close to ten o'clock at night, which
Speaker 10: goes a little bit beyond that. And then one of
Speaker 10: the challenges, and I know you're only getting a little
Speaker 10: piece of the information about exactly how we're doing this.
Speaker 10: But from the four different locations that we fly on
Speaker 10: each of the rooftops, we have what's called the piloting
Speaker 10: command and thatlot in command is contracted through a company
Speaker 10: and we and they just have visual awareness of the
Speaker 10: sky and they working in coordination with our drone pilot
Speaker 10: that's inside our operations center. But that's a huge expense
Speaker 10: for us to pay lead for each site right now
Speaker 10: with the operations that we have to paint abut one
Speaker 10: hundred thousand dollars per year, So that's four hundred thousand
Speaker 10: dollars for four locations beyond all the other processes here.
Speaker 10: And so if you can get expensive, my hobe is
Speaker 10: that and we keep hearing about it. We've seen some
Speaker 10: of the testing and we've been testing it as well
Speaker 10: in our area or what's called drone in the box
Speaker 10: or there's some of the systems that are out there
Speaker 10: right now that organizations are using that are a toonaments
Speaker 10: and so we're getting there, but we're not quite there
Speaker 10: because it's very different when you're dealing with flying over
Speaker 10: people and you're flying.
Speaker 7: Into areas where the drone was to drop out of.
Speaker 10: The sky and harm people in our community. That could
Speaker 10: create tremendous challenges for a silberberry. As I mentioned the
Speaker 10: crawl things.
Speaker 13: So to explain how these AI autonomous drones would work,
Speaker 13: It's essentially this box about the size of a truck
Speaker 13: bed that can either be mounted in like a police
Speaker 13: pickup truck or be stored on various rooftops around the city,
Speaker 13: and someone just needs to point at a place on
Speaker 13: a map and the drone will fly in pilot itself
Speaker 13: around obstacles and basically circle around an area to do surveillance,
Speaker 13: and you can call it back when you're done. This
Speaker 13: would require a whole bunch of drones to just be
Speaker 13: launching and being piloted by themselves. You wouldn't have to
Speaker 13: train random police officers to become FAA licensed pilots, and
Speaker 13: you could just have the whole thing in the box
Speaker 13: like it's called drone in the box. And these are
Speaker 13: only going to become more common and cheaper. Imagine having
Speaker 13: ten of these throat a city, launching from like ten
Speaker 13: different rooftops, being able to fly around by themselves, constantly
Speaker 13: going around in communities, constantly going to GPS coordinates linked
Speaker 13: to the nine one one calls creating a whole wealth
Speaker 13: of footage instantly available to police, live streamed from the air.
Speaker 13: Matt Sloane, the founder of Skyfire Consulting, a company here
Speaker 13: in Atlanta that trains law enforcement agencies on the use
Speaker 13: of drones and DFR programs, thinks that we'll start seeing
Speaker 13: autonomous deployment of police drones within the next year or two,
Speaker 13: as police budgets increase and become allocated for unmanned aerial systems.
Speaker 13: He referred to the state of drone use by police
Speaker 13: as quote rapidly escalating. Jula Vista likes to market itself
Speaker 13: as a pioneer of the smart city movement, which consequently
Speaker 13: makes them able to receive a whole bunch of grant funding.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 13: The idea of the smart city is built around having
Speaker 13: a massive amount of data to automate certain city services.
Speaker 13: So for this idea to work, there needs to be
Speaker 13: a way to collect that data, and these drones are
Speaker 13: a major part of that. The website for the city
Speaker 13: of Truela Vista also lists projects like electronic transportation, adaptive
Speaker 13: traffic signals in app for non emergency city services, as
Speaker 13: well as quote crime mapping and police dispatch modernization unquote
Speaker 13: as also being smart city initiatives.
Speaker 10: We have what's called by nine one one, and that
Speaker 10: allows my officers to hear incoming nine more one calls
Speaker 10: before dispatch even puts it into the system. They can
Speaker 10: hear what's going on there, and that is tremendously in
Speaker 10: valuable to them. We have so many different layers of
Speaker 10: technology that have really showcase the value.
Speaker 13: Live nine one one is a new piece of software
Speaker 13: that allows patrol officers to listen to live stream to
Speaker 13: nine one one calls directly and pinpoints the location of
Speaker 13: the caller via GPS. Now, I don't even have time
Speaker 13: to get into the many reasons that this could be
Speaker 13: a bad idea, but simply put, police do not need
Speaker 13: to respond to every call that goes into nine one one,
Speaker 13: let alone be giving random cops this ability to self
Speaker 13: dispatch on their own. It just seems like that could
Speaker 13: have many many consequences. But anyway, back to drones. According
Speaker 13: to a twenty twenty article in the newspaper Loprenza, cities
Speaker 13: in San Diego County like Chula Vista, have received equipment
Speaker 13: such as tethered drones used for stationary surveillance poll cameras,
Speaker 13: license plate readers, and cell phone cracking technology used to
Speaker 13: circumvent passwords from the Urban Area Security Initiative DHS grant program.
Speaker 13: A lot of these technologies have use in the Smart
Speaker 13: City Idyllic plan for data collection to automate city services.
Speaker 13: After the drone panel was over and I was walking
Speaker 13: around the show floor at CEES, I couldn't help but
Speaker 13: notice all of the smart cameras and AI image recognition
Speaker 13: systems being advertised for law enforcement applications. Software that can
Speaker 13: almost instantaneously scan through a wealth of footage and track
Speaker 13: people's movements, run facial recognition, and identify every article of clothing.
Speaker 13: Versions of this type of software are already in use
Speaker 13: by many police departments, and they will only get better, cheaper,
Speaker 13: and more common. In effect, what this does is remove
Speaker 13: a lot of the detective legwork. Instead of having to
Speaker 13: manually map someone's movements and track down what niche etsy
Speaker 13: shirt someone's wearing, these aisystems can now do this all automatically.
Speaker 13: To quote the MIT Tech Review article on cvpd's DFR
Speaker 13: drone program quote. As the technology continues to spread, privacy
Speaker 13: and civil liberty groups are raising the question of what
Speaker 13: happens when drones are combined with license plate readers, networks
Speaker 13: of fixed cameras, and new real time command centers that
Speaker 13: digest and sort through video evidence. This digital dragnet could
Speaker 13: dramatically expand surveillance capabilities and lead to even more police
Speaker 13: interactions with demographics that have historically suffered from over policing.
Speaker 5: Unquote.
Speaker 13: Pedro Rios, a human rights advocate with the American Friends
Speaker 13: Service Committee and a member of Chula Vista's Community Tech Council,
Speaker 13: was quoted in the MIT article saying, quote, people in
Speaker 13: the community have no awareness of what images are captured,
Speaker 13: how the footage is retained, and who has access. It's
Speaker 13: a big red flag for a city that says it's
Speaker 13: at the forefront of the smart city movement.
Speaker 4: Unquote.
Speaker 10: These dramas they're revolutionizing the world. You, I mean people
Speaker 10: who are not taking drawn seriously right now? Who will
Speaker 10: be left behind. We have flown eighteen one hundred and
Speaker 10: fifty missions. You can go on a web page, you
Speaker 10: can see the flight data. We're extremely transparent. We share
Speaker 10: all that with our community.
Speaker 2: We have no need to hide.
Speaker 7: We are in the business of saving wise and I
Speaker 7: believe drums are one of the best estories focused.
Speaker 13: If they truly have nothing to hide and are extremely
Speaker 13: transparent about the use of their camera mounted drones, I
Speaker 13: wonder why they've spent years in court fighting to keep
Speaker 13: every second of drone footage from being seen by the public. Luckily,
Speaker 13: after Chief Kennedy talked for like thirty minutes about how
Speaker 13: much they care about community engagement and how transparent they
Speaker 13: are with their flight data, I was able to ask
Speaker 13: the Chief how their commitment to transparency relates to the
Speaker 13: recent lawsuit she just lost over hiding drone footage. And
Speaker 13: I also threw in a question about drones at protests.
Speaker 13: Let's take a listen.
Speaker 4: Yeah, a question for the chief.
Speaker 11: So, I know you talked about the importance of like
Speaker 11: listening to the community and community engagement. And I'm not
Speaker 11: sure this is the case for your department, but other
Speaker 11: departments who've kind of followed suit, for your example, have
Speaker 11: been using drones to surveil first amendent activity stuff. And
Speaker 11: I know you recently lost a court case regarding the
Speaker 11: availability of drone footage, so I'm curious about kind of
Speaker 11: what the rationale for that footage is and how that
Speaker 11: plays into this idea of trying to be transparent with
Speaker 11: the community for how these drones are being used.
Speaker 10: That's going to be going to be a little bit
Speaker 10: difficult for me to answer because the court case is
Speaker 10: still moving forward.
Speaker 7: It's an active case. If you read it, we didn't
Speaker 7: lose the case.
Speaker 10: It was recommended to go to a lower core to
Speaker 10: go back for some clarification under three categories.
Speaker 13: Now this is either a straight upply or a huge
Speaker 13: cope and a gross mischaracterization.
Speaker 5: But more on that in a sec I think.
Speaker 10: It's really important. As I mentioned, there are ethics involved in.
Speaker 10: The ethical responsibility that you have as a law enforcement
Speaker 10: agency is super important. So how you utilize your drones
Speaker 10: and how you do outreach with your community is fundamentally important.
Speaker 10: And so we don't use our drones for if there
Speaker 10: was a protest, We would not use are drones if
Speaker 10: there was if it turned into a riot. So if
Speaker 10: people were out there and they have the ability to
Speaker 10: to speak freely to share their concerns, and if it's
Speaker 10: in opposition, our goal is to make sure that we
Speaker 10: keep it safe for all parties involved on either side.
Speaker 10: So my hope is that other people look at it
Speaker 10: the same way that we do, and hopefully I've been
Speaker 10: able to answer it as much as I believe me,
Speaker 10: I'm dying to give you more than I can't.
Speaker 9: Okay, thank you for those questions, Folks were out of time.
Speaker 9: Maybe there could be questions after the.
Speaker 13: Session, So yeah, there were no more questions after mine.
Speaker 13: I kind of shut down that possibility anyway.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 13: So, first of all, the line between a protest and
Speaker 13: a riot is meaningless. Police can declare riot for any
Speaker 13: reason they see fit, including people being in a road marching.
Speaker 13: I've seen this happen dozens of times, nearly hundreds of
Speaker 13: times actually, So moving on from that immediately, let's go
Speaker 13: back to the court case. The city of Cheuelavista did
Speaker 13: lose the argument that they were trying to make. They
Speaker 13: did lose the case. The Fourth District Court of Appeals
Speaker 13: ruled that claiming exemption from the Public Records Act was
Speaker 13: unlawful and sent the case back to trial court to
Speaker 13: hammer the details of how much footage is subject to
Speaker 13: public disclosure and figure out a process for standardizing the
Speaker 13: release of the footage. Now. The same day I attended
Speaker 13: this panel in Las Vegas, January ninth, the city of
Speaker 13: Chula Vista requested an appeal to the California Supreme Court
Speaker 13: to prevent the release of their aerial video footage. There
Speaker 13: is a sixty day waiting period where the High Court
Speaker 13: will decide whether or not to take the case, and
Speaker 13: if they decline finally, it will go back to trial
Speaker 13: court to decide on the process of how selected drone
Speaker 13: footage shall be made publicly available. The police are now
Speaker 13: currently claiming that make DFR footage adhere to the Public
Speaker 13: Records Act would violate the privacy of Chula Vista residents
Speaker 13: captured in the videos, which perhaps demonstrates that the aerial
Speaker 13: videos should have never been captured in the first place.
Speaker 13: I'm going to read a press release from the city's
Speaker 13: communication manager. Quote, the city declined to provide the copies
Speaker 13: because doing so might have violated individual privacy rights. The
Speaker 13: city would have to manually review and redact every video
Speaker 13: recording to protect information considered personal, such as the images
Speaker 13: of faces, license plates, backyards, and more. Unquote, So the
Speaker 13: city is both trying to argue that having to manually
Speaker 13: review each requested file to determine if the video in
Speaker 13: question is related to appending investigation, as well as redacting
Speaker 13: personal information captured on camera would be way too costly
Speaker 13: and time consuming. City officials claim that reviewing and redacting
Speaker 13: videos from one month to obscure faces, license plates, and
Speaker 13: backyards would take a full time employee around two hundred
Speaker 13: and thirty days. I'm going to read a little bit
Speaker 13: more from the city's recent statement. Quote, while the city
Speaker 13: takes very seriously its obligation to provide the public access
Speaker 13: to public records, the city is concerned that the Court
Speaker 13: of Appeal's opinion may compromise significant privacy concerns of members
Speaker 13: of the public in this case or in future requests.
Speaker 4: Unquote.
Speaker 13: Somehow the city is missing the point that this is
Speaker 13: the very reason the drone footage is being requested to
Speaker 13: learn the actual nature of this highly influential drone first
Speaker 13: responder program that's being adopted across the country. If the
Speaker 13: existence of this footage is such a massive privacy violation,
Speaker 13: that implies that the recording of said footage itself implicitly
Speaker 13: violates people's privacy, and the harder police fight to hide
Speaker 13: their sweeping collection of aerial footage, all the more suspicious
Speaker 13: this entire program seems.
Speaker 6: So.
Speaker 13: That is what I have to say about Chula Vista's
Speaker 13: drone first Responder program. In about a month and a half,
Speaker 13: the Supreme Court of California will make their decision on
Speaker 13: whether or not they're going to hear this case. If
Speaker 13: they decline, then the president will be set statewide against
Speaker 13: this exemption of the Public Records Act by hiding drone footage,
Speaker 13: So that will be really cool, And then hopefully within
Speaker 13: the next year, we'll finally be able to see what
Speaker 13: some of this footage actually looks like, how good their
Speaker 13: cameras are, how much they can zoom in, all of
Speaker 13: the details of how much of the city they're capturing,
Speaker 13: all this kind of stuff, how often the drones are
Speaker 13: in the air, all of those types of things that
Speaker 13: it will be easier to highlight once we can actually
Speaker 13: take a look at the footage.
Speaker 5: And I assume that.
Speaker 13: Going through and releasing requested files for one month will
Speaker 13: probably end up not taking two hundred and thirty days.
Speaker 13: But I do know how the police love to love
Speaker 13: to stretch out these public records requests for as long
Speaker 13: as they can. As the request that this lawsuit it
Speaker 13: stems from, it's all the way back to April of
Speaker 13: twenty twenty one, So hopefully hopefully more than three years later,
Speaker 13: we'll finally get a look special thanks to Loprenza for
Speaker 13: starting this lawsuit and doing all of the hard work
Speaker 13: to actually force the police to be transparent. And if
Speaker 13: you want to read more, I'd recommend checking out the
Speaker 13: website to Loprenza dot org, as well as the MIT
Speaker 13: tech review piece, which provided some really really useful information
Speaker 13: to fill in the gaps between my own research.
Speaker 12: So yeah, thank you for.
Speaker 13: Listening to It could happen here. It certainly could happen
Speaker 13: here in terms of seeing more of these little fuckers
Speaker 13: flying around in the air.
Speaker 2: Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the universe.
Speaker 4: It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 8: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 8: Coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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Speaker 6: You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated
Speaker 6: monthly at cool Zone Media dot com slash sources.
Speaker 8: Thanks for listening.