Speaker 1: A 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 that basically all of last
Speaker 2: week is about the twenty twenty four Republican National Convention,
Speaker 2: a four day period of time that I'm not sure
Speaker 2: ever ended or ever really had a beginning. As of
Speaker 2: right now, we are stuck in the hotel because what
Speaker 2: we initially thought was a hack and may just have
Speaker 2: been a fuck up pushing an update by cloud strike,
Speaker 2: but by any measure of the word is like the
Speaker 2: greatest computer disaster of mine modern times has stranded every
Speaker 2: Republican in the country in the city of Milwaukee.
Speaker 3: With Yeah, we are trapped with every single Republican in Milwaukee,
Speaker 3: Wisconsin as we wait for airports like a Stephen kingne
Speaker 3: it's feeling quite dystopian. We've already been dealing with a
Speaker 3: great deal of like time dilation. Just this past week,
Speaker 3: this week has felt it first just felt like a month,
Speaker 3: and then it just felt like an eternity. Yeah, like
Speaker 3: we were just always reporting on the RNZ. This is
Speaker 3: this is all we have ever done.
Speaker 2: Every single day of this was longer than my childhood.
Speaker 3: Yeah. No, I feel like all I've ever done is
Speaker 3: a person is be someone who reports in the RNC.
Speaker 3: This is just the entirety of my existence and life purpose.
Speaker 2: It's like that Star Trek episode where they have like
Speaker 2: the fake casino because they found these aliens found a
Speaker 2: stranded astronaut and to try to make him comfortable, like
Speaker 2: recreated a dime store novel, and all of these fake
Speaker 2: people have only ever lived in the casino, experiencing the
Speaker 2: same day forever. That's us, that's us at the rn sight.
Speaker 3: I was only created to report on the RNC.
Speaker 2: Did I have a before? Did I have an after?
Speaker 2: Absolutely not. Yeah. Anyway, so we're doing well, is the
Speaker 2: short of that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're mentally healthy and well and well suited to
Speaker 3: handle this political task.
Speaker 2: I guess the big story, the one that's really worth
Speaker 2: us talking about right now, is that last night you
Speaker 2: and I went to see the Trump speech spectacular. Now,
Speaker 2: every day of the convention, during the early part of
Speaker 2: the day, you'll have some speeches, and you'll have even
Speaker 2: some outside of the event. Different groups and organizations will
Speaker 2: rent out hotel, ballrooms, conference rooms, they'll give speeches, they'll
Speaker 2: do panels, there's workshops, and obviously inside the wire, so
Speaker 2: to speak, you have different dignitaries, politicians, you know, Ted
Speaker 2: Kruz will come by and I'll sit down to be
Speaker 2: interviewed by a podcaster, a radio host. Rudy Giuliani's doing
Speaker 2: the same thing. You've got all these people who do
Speaker 2: their shows live from the event and then in the
Speaker 2: evenings usually starting around like five to seven and something
Speaker 2: like that. Yeah, you start having speeches, and part of
Speaker 2: what you know, speeches at the RNC are it's obviously
Speaker 2: it's a way to hype up the base. This is
Speaker 2: the base. And one of the things I try to
Speaker 2: get across to people I posted on day one while
Speaker 2: there were some very dystopian shit coming out Marjorie Taylor
Speaker 2: Green speech and whatnot, how empty you know the stadium
Speaker 2: was to be, like, look, there's not that many people here,
Speaker 2: And someone was like, well, it's kind of dishonest to
Speaker 2: say that, because this is an invite on the event
Speaker 2: that you need credentials for. And well, that's my point though,
Speaker 2: is like as crazy as a lot of this stuff is,
Speaker 2: and we're going to get into a lot of the crazy,
Speaker 2: you don't also you don't want to discount it because
Speaker 2: these people are very powerful and they can do a
Speaker 2: lot of damage, and they there's a very good chance
Speaker 2: they're going to wind up with very close to total power.
Speaker 2: But they're also not representative of like a massive chunk
Speaker 2: of this country. Like these are the weirdest of the weird.
Speaker 2: These are the high freaks of Republican party politics. These
Speaker 2: are the nabobs and priests and shamans of their political class.
Speaker 2: And so you shouldn't over extend the craziness to think that, like, well,
Speaker 2: every one of my neighbors who is a conservative is
Speaker 2: this kind of person. Now, some of you do have
Speaker 2: neighbors who are this kind of person.
Speaker 3: So, and Trump's speech was certainly much more well attended
Speaker 3: than any other.
Speaker 2: Yes, and it was it was also a very different
Speaker 2: vibe because all of those other nights, all of the speeches.
Speaker 2: You know, a big part of what this is for
Speaker 2: the people who get speeches is like, we want to
Speaker 2: give you a reward for being a good party soldier,
Speaker 2: but no one wants to promise you a cabinet position
Speaker 2: right now. You know, we can't get like, so we'll
Speaker 2: give you a speech at the RNC. You can lead,
Speaker 2: and you can get on right before Tucker, you know,
Speaker 2: or you can come on right after Tucker or whatever
Speaker 2: like that, you know, And it's kind of how you
Speaker 2: it's one way to dole out favors, right, because it's
Speaker 2: good for people's you know, if you're head up an organization,
Speaker 2: it might get you some fundraising at any rate. It
Speaker 2: makes you look more connected at something you brag about
Speaker 2: to your friends. You get to go backstage and be
Speaker 2: around the VIPs and whatnot, be a VIP yourself.
Speaker 3: And that certainly the case for someone like the VEC, right,
Speaker 3: someone who doesn't hold like that office, never has, Yeah,
Speaker 3: but he's trying to position himself as being, you know,
Speaker 3: an active part of this political project act.
Speaker 2: Franklin Graham, Billy Graham's killer who gave a speech. That's
Speaker 2: not a guy who's you know, an elected leader, but
Speaker 2: it's he's a guy you won on your side, so
Speaker 2: let's give let's give him a nice position. We'll put
Speaker 2: him right after whol Cogan.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: Which I guess is you know that that kind of
Speaker 2: gets it why Thursday was so different from the other
Speaker 2: nights because while the other Knights felt like a political convention,
Speaker 2: because the Dims do the same thing, right like that
Speaker 2: their speeches occupy roughly the same role in their party.
Speaker 2: Last night felt like a concert. Last night was the
Speaker 2: vibes of like a show. You are going to get
Speaker 2: hyped up and see a show. People were static. There
Speaker 2: was actually music acts like, not just the band that
Speaker 2: plays in between speeches, but Kid Rock came out and
Speaker 2: did a set.
Speaker 3: It was all a big put on before Ormans, Yes
Speaker 3: it was. It was in many cases well put on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it was very competently stage managed. There's no
Speaker 2: no denying that. We can talk about the content of
Speaker 2: the speech, and I've seen a lot of it, you know,
Speaker 2: same Sater who you know. I like, I'm not trying
Speaker 2: to shit, I'm not gonna shit on Sam or anything.
Speaker 2: But I saw his take being like I felt like
Speaker 2: this was kind of this seems like it's a weak speech.
Speaker 2: It's not very coherent. You know, people in the audience
Speaker 2: looked sleepy. That was not the vibe during Trump speech.
Speaker 3: I see where he's coming from, because this was one
Speaker 3: of the quieter Trump's speeches.
Speaker 2: Trump is quieter, sure.
Speaker 3: I think this this this was an intentional effort to
Speaker 3: blend some of his more classic talking points with this
Speaker 3: elder statesman kind of vibe and selectively utilizing the assassination
Speaker 3: attempt to talk about both yourself as this like broader
Speaker 3: political figure that that people should unite behind, because this
Speaker 3: incident really shows how divided we are, and what we
Speaker 3: really need to do to unite the country is stop
Speaker 3: attacking Trump, and that's the only way to do it.
Speaker 3: So like this, this was all on purpose and kind
Speaker 3: of using that more sympathetic unity messaging to squeeze in
Speaker 3: all of his same extremely far right talking points, just
Speaker 3: slipping in between calls for like unity and ending division
Speaker 3: and all of that.
Speaker 2: And also the fucking the boys are playing in women's
Speaker 2: sports and.
Speaker 3: The cannibal elector the late Gray.
Speaker 2: He had a Hannibal But we should we're getting ahead
Speaker 2: of ourselves. But I do want to just kind of
Speaker 2: say upfront. My take differs from what I've seen from
Speaker 2: Sam Cedar and what I've seen from a number of
Speaker 2: folks who watched, you know, the closed circuit version of this.
Speaker 2: The audience loved it. Yeah, like they loved it, and
Speaker 2: you can you can taste in the air the degree
Speaker 2: to which they love Trump. This is like not if
Speaker 2: you have not been to one of these rallies. And
Speaker 2: even this is different because I've been to a you know,
Speaker 2: a regular Trump rally. This was different than that because
Speaker 2: this is again like the most dedicated chunk of the base.
Speaker 2: It's the very much a religious experience for these people.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, it definitely had that spiritual vibe. So the
Speaker 3: first speaker, we wanted to really get to in person
Speaker 3: to hear talk with Tucker, and Tucker, you have a
Speaker 3: very efficient speech. He did not read off a teleprompter.
Speaker 3: He was at living the best speech at the convention.
Speaker 3: He was he was, he was. He was a pretty
Speaker 3: good speaker. And I know we often will make fun
Speaker 3: of kind of Tucker's mode of speaking on television, which
Speaker 3: can come off as a little bit like disjointed and
Speaker 3: kind of just like confused. You know, he has that
Speaker 3: like resting confused look on his face. He was a
Speaker 3: very good live performer. Yeah, this he gave a stronger
Speaker 3: live performance than I think what a lot of his
Speaker 3: televised performances come off at. He was.
Speaker 2: He gave an eerdit and smooth summary of fascist ideology
Speaker 2: of specifically what used to be called the Futor prinzip
Speaker 2: or Fewer principle, which is this idea that came out
Speaker 2: of the Nazi movement of a nation being embodied by
Speaker 2: a man, and the man is accountable to the people,
Speaker 2: not in a sense that we would consider like checks
Speaker 2: and ballot and says, but in some deep spiritual connection
Speaker 2: that they have. And Tucker very directly like like hearkened
Speaker 2: to that. He made a comment about like you know,
Speaker 2: Trump talked to me and he was like, you know,
Speaker 2: when I got shot, I expected to see the crowd running, screaming, stampeding, panicking,
Speaker 2: and no one did. And Tucker was like, that's because
Speaker 2: you're the leader, and the leader the people follow the leader,
Speaker 2: and they you know, you didn't panic, so they won't panic. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's the most direct old style. This is nineteen twenties
Speaker 2: Nazism stuff that Tucker is throwing out. And he he
Speaker 2: discussed it in a way that was very smooth and
Speaker 2: very palatable to American ears. And that was the most
Speaker 2: chilling part of the night for me, because Trump's speech
Speaker 2: was not a particularly I think back to twenty sixteen
Speaker 2: and I was I was at the R and C
Speaker 2: in twenty sixteen. Trump's speech on the last night of
Speaker 2: the R and C was his blood in the Street speech.
Speaker 2: It was a he was angry, it was aggressive. It
Speaker 2: was a violent speech, right, and there were there were moments,
Speaker 2: certainly silence in his speech, but not much that was
Speaker 2: not the overall vibe. That was not what he built towards.
Speaker 2: It wasn't the thing he ended on, and it was
Speaker 2: never really a focus. But what Tucker was focusing on
Speaker 2: was getting people on board the concept that they are
Speaker 2: bonded to Trump in a spiritual sense and that the
Speaker 2: nation is and that Trump is the leader, not by
Speaker 2: dint of having been elected, but by dint of some
Speaker 2: sort of psycha like psycho religious mystic bond.
Speaker 3: Tucker was also the first guy I heard of the
Speaker 3: convention to mention Antifa at all, first and only saying
Speaker 3: Antifa is the Democrats owned militia, which is, you know
Speaker 3: something that you would hear four years ago, and right
Speaker 3: before Tucker's speech, I actually was talking with Robert being like, hey,
Speaker 3: I've not heard anyone mention INTIFA this entire week, and
Speaker 3: like this was used to be such a big thing
Speaker 3: in their political messaging, both like four years ago, two
Speaker 3: years ago, and this week, it was just completely absent. Obviously,
Speaker 3: it has been replaced by some of this like gender ideology, groomer,
Speaker 3: kind of transpanic type stuff, but it is a noticeable
Speaker 3: absence in the current talking points of the Republican Party
Speaker 3: save for this one mentioned by Tucker.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, during Trump's speech, I don't even
Speaker 2: recall him bringing up the radical left. He didn't even
Speaker 2: He made a couple of joke and these those on
Speaker 2: the two of the jokes that that got the best
Speaker 2: crowd response from him is he would bring up Biden,
Speaker 2: but they say, I'm not going to mention his name.
Speaker 2: I promise I won't talk about him, you know, And
Speaker 2: that got a laugh every time that he did it,
Speaker 2: which I counted twice. He did make one reference to
Speaker 2: the shooter and said he tried to stop our movement. Yeah,
Speaker 2: greatest movement in the history of the country. And yeah,
Speaker 2: that was interesting to me. I think that he was
Speaker 2: kind of playing easing off the gas on that one,
Speaker 2: because there's still so much that's uncertain about the shooter
Speaker 2: and his motives. I went to work out today because
Speaker 2: the morning after convention, that's kind of how I purged
Speaker 2: the hangover from my body. And I was watching Fox
Speaker 2: News on the TV in the gym, And I don't
Speaker 2: watch television news much because I'm a person who has
Speaker 2: to do things, but it is useful sometimes because it
Speaker 2: connects you with how an unfortunate number of people in
Speaker 2: this country do and take their news. And this morning,
Speaker 2: one of the reports was about the shooter and how
Speaker 2: the FBI had found that he had three encrypted accounts
Speaker 2: offshore overseas that they're trying to break into. They are
Speaker 2: referring to I think discord kind of accounts and stuff
Speaker 2: like that, like he might have like an.
Speaker 3: We have like a WhatsApp, he might have WhatsApp inn account.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's an encrypted email possibly. Yeah, the stuff that
Speaker 2: like I have, most people have. But they were like,
Speaker 2: so this makes it even more likely that Iran is involved.
Speaker 2: You know, there's some sort of a rant because like
Speaker 2: overseas that means Iran oh man, there's lots of companies
Speaker 2: that have encrypted apps that aren't based in the we
Speaker 2: I used to shill for a VPN that was based
Speaker 2: I think Nord is based in Switzerland. Maybe I'm wrong
Speaker 2: about that, but like some of the VPNs are based
Speaker 2: in Switzerland and like these are not. It's not that
Speaker 2: it's overseas. Does not mean there's any tie to anything
Speaker 2: other than this kid, like a lot of people had,
Speaker 2: was used in encrypted messaging platforms. Obviously, I'm interested, you know,
Speaker 2: if the FBI, if or when they get into that stuff,
Speaker 2: what they find. But I don't think they're going to
Speaker 2: find that. The fucking Ayatola gave this guy a five
Speaker 2: hundred dollars AR fifteen and fifty rounds of ammunition.
Speaker 3: That is certainly doubtful. I mean, yeah, I think Tu
Speaker 3: Tucker had some of the best audience reactions since Marjor
Speaker 3: Taylor Green's speech. He called jd Vance a friend said
Speaker 3: that Advance's politics, They're closer to the average Trump voter
Speaker 3: than anyone else in Washington. And yeah, just an overall
Speaker 3: very very polished speech.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we should probably do an ad break now, huh,
Speaker 2: we should. We're back so after Tucker. We had a
Speaker 2: couple of other people come on. There was a woman
Speaker 2: who worked for an education a conservative education political activist group,
Speaker 2: who her whole thing was, you know, I worked in
Speaker 2: prisons for a while and then I switched over to
Speaker 2: working in schools. And the thing that shocked me is
Speaker 2: our schools are so much more of our schools are
Speaker 2: like prisons, which I was like, well, actually, there's a
Speaker 2: lot to be said about the way in with some
Speaker 2: of the same technology, right, yes, no, this is there's
Speaker 2: a lot to do. And then she was like, because
Speaker 2: children are much more violent than convicted felons, and like, oh,
Speaker 2: a lot of what she was saying is that, like,
Speaker 2: schools are completely out of control. And obviously, in the
Speaker 2: wake of the height of the COVID pandemic and the lockdown,
Speaker 2: school violence did soar. It's been coming back down. Overall,
Speaker 2: schools have been getting less violent in every single way
Speaker 2: but shootings for twenty straight years. And that is that
Speaker 2: is the case now, like under in Joe Biden's America, schools,
Speaker 2: like violence that is not related to shootings is going down.
Speaker 2: But what she was saying is that we need to
Speaker 2: be able to expel and suspend kids, particularly, suspend kids
Speaker 2: more often for bad behavior. There is actually quite a
Speaker 2: bit of data that shows that when you suspend children,
Speaker 2: it makes them more likely to offend and disrupt class
Speaker 2: in the future, Like it increases the problems that you
Speaker 2: are supposed to be stopping. Like most conservative measures that
Speaker 2: are kind of like punitive in nature, it doesn't actually
Speaker 2: do the trick. I don't know why I'm arguing with
Speaker 2: this lady, but it is important that that's a big
Speaker 2: part of how they're pitching what ultimately is a plan
Speaker 2: to win the Department of Education to parents is like,
Speaker 2: your schools are so dangerous for your kid, you need
Speaker 2: to be able to have a voucher to send them
Speaker 2: to a private school. And we need to be able
Speaker 2: to kick these underperforming black students out of schools in
Speaker 2: order to make them safer for everybody, right, and shuffle
Speaker 2: them off into the car serial system.
Speaker 3: Right. This whole speech was kind of a coded way
Speaker 3: of talking about like urban crime. She blamed this problem
Speaker 3: on an Obama Biden policy to limit suspension rates. Whe
Speaker 3: Trump undid and yeah, said that the solution is both
Speaker 3: more suspensions and more school resource officers, which a Kido
Speaker 3: Institute says actually increases the number of Island instants in schools.
Speaker 3: So but again, of course they're going to call for
Speaker 3: more police. This is the Republican Party.
Speaker 2: Honestly, I don't know why we even bother like fact checking.
Speaker 2: This is important because I care, like in you care,
Speaker 2: and but like our audience knows, the lady that gets
Speaker 2: up to talk about school policy at the R and
Speaker 2: C is not going to be bringing out good policy.
Speaker 3: But this is just how everything works. Like this just
Speaker 3: kind of underlines the alternate world that is formed in
Speaker 3: places like this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you can't you can't fight these people with facts.
Speaker 2: That is the mistake liberals always make. It's like, well,
Speaker 2: if we can just out argue them, if we can
Speaker 2: get them, get them in front of the American people
Speaker 2: and see how bankrupt their ideas are. And that's not
Speaker 2: how you do it. Now. That's not to say that
Speaker 2: you shouldn't get out and engage with them, because what
Speaker 2: does work is showing the American people reminding them these
Speaker 2: are freaks. These people are weird. These people are off putting,
Speaker 2: These people are scary, and you don't want to be
Speaker 2: around them, and by god, you don't want them with
Speaker 2: their finger on the button, Like I do think that consistently.
Speaker 3: Works, and unfortunately that freaks nature can sometimes help them,
Speaker 3: like when you pull out hul cogd onto stage waving
Speaker 3: an American flag, calling Trump his hero and his gladiator.
Speaker 2: And talking about how, yeah, all of America are gonna
Speaker 2: be the Trump bites, that's what they're gonna call him,
Speaker 2: which apparently he used to do with nWo back in
Speaker 2: the day, back in his glory day he got he
Speaker 2: couldn't stop himself from talking about beating Andrea the Giant
Speaker 2: at WrestleMania. I think it was like nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 2: He made two different Andre the Giant references, both of
Speaker 2: which were very mean. To Andre the Giant, who I wish,
Speaker 2: Oh Andre, No, the wrong one died.
Speaker 3: Al Cogan compared the energy of the RNC to a
Speaker 3: WWE match, which he is not was not wrong, It's
Speaker 3: very similar. Look, I'm not gonna like hull Cogan understands
Speaker 3: this crowd, oh more than almost more than maybe any
Speaker 3: other actual speaker. Yeah, like like Tucker kind of understands them,
Speaker 3: but but hull Cogan even more so.
Speaker 2: They loved him. Yeah when he ripped his shirt off.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, Tank top underneath.
Speaker 2: That was the best moment of the RNC. That was
Speaker 2: the moment where I was like, all right, fuck it.
Speaker 3: He said that he usually stays out of politics, but
Speaker 3: after what happened on Saturday, he could no longer stay silent,
Speaker 3: and then spend you know, the rest of the speech
Speaker 3: just praising Trump, saying how tough he is, saying that
Speaker 3: you know, he's survived all these court cases, these investigations, impeachments,
Speaker 3: and we need a tough man to take on like politicians,
Speaker 3: criminals and drug dealers. And no, it was It was
Speaker 3: a in a week full of kind of surreal moments
Speaker 3: where you're seeing these people that you only interact with
Speaker 3: on a screen. H you just see them walk past you,
Speaker 3: like all the time every day. This was certainly one
Speaker 3: of the most surreal men.
Speaker 2: And Cawthorne nearly hit me with his wheelchair. And I'm
Speaker 2: not the only one I talked to with that story.
Speaker 2: He's a little reckless, So I'm gonna be honest.
Speaker 3: Maybe he thought you were a tree.
Speaker 2: Maybe he thought it.
Speaker 1: Was a tree.
Speaker 2: I love that we saw two people, two Republicans at
Speaker 2: this convention, both of whom have a tragic tree story.
Speaker 2: So I'm talking about Greg Abbott.
Speaker 3: They made the kind of baffling decision on the schedule
Speaker 3: to put Franklin Graham after Hulk Hogan.
Speaker 2: Not not nice to Franklin Graham, to be honest, No, yeah,
Speaker 2: because he's he did the thing that like usually gets
Speaker 2: a good reaction, which is the prayer. Right He's there
Speaker 2: to do the prayer, and this is a good crowd
Speaker 2: for a prayer, right, Like, that's not a that's not
Speaker 2: like a lame thing to these people. They love doing that.
Speaker 2: But no one's heart was fully into the prayer after Hulk, Like,
Speaker 2: you can't, you can't get the people. It's a it's
Speaker 2: a tough come down from Hulk Hogan ripped his shirt
Speaker 2: off on stage too. Now let's bow our heads and
Speaker 2: thank God.
Speaker 3: But if you didn't grow up iny Minchelle Circles of
Speaker 3: Franklin Graham is the son of Billy Graham, possibly the
Speaker 3: most famous pastor in American history, at least in the
Speaker 3: past one hundred.
Speaker 2: Years, since sinners in the hands of an angry God,
Speaker 2: like the most popular man of faith in the country.
Speaker 3: And he closed his prayer by saying, all authority comes
Speaker 3: from you, speaking of God, and we ask if it
Speaker 3: be thy will that you will make America great once again.
Speaker 3: Just a wonderful, a wonderful Christian message.
Speaker 2: Uh huh grand So that was nice, and Eric Trump
Speaker 2: gave a very Uh he tried his best, which is
Speaker 2: basically what Trump said. Again, you Hulk Hogan has just
Speaker 2: been on, Trump is about to be on. It is
Speaker 2: the last night of the RNC, and everyone is absolutely
Speaker 2: certain of victory. So as a speaker tonight, you couldn't
Speaker 2: be more teed up for a good reaction. And he
Speaker 2: could barely get laughs, he could barely get cheers. Like
Speaker 2: even when he did the anti trans stuff, it didn't
Speaker 2: get it got a muted reaction, not because people aren't bicketed,
Speaker 2: because they loved it when Marjorie Taylor Green did the
Speaker 2: say they loved it when Trump did. Eric Trump just
Speaker 2: sucks yeah at speaking, probably at everything, but he did
Speaker 2: not get a reaction. I cannot overemphasize to you how
Speaker 2: little this crowd wanted to listen to Eric.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I mean he shout it out. Monster Liberty
Speaker 3: said that the Trump admin will fight against brainwashing, and
Speaker 3: schools will fight against homeless people, specifically taking resources from
Speaker 3: veterans and of course trans people in sports.
Speaker 2: He kept bringing up Ukraine to stealing resources from Americans.
Speaker 2: He was like the most brought up Ukraine in a
Speaker 2: derogatory sense, more than I think any other single speaker
Speaker 2: at the convention, which is interesting because his dad took
Speaker 2: even a bit of a different tact with that. So yeah,
Speaker 2: I found that interesting. But I did not find his
Speaker 2: speech interesting because he is a bad speaker.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 3: The only line I found interesting is when he was
Speaker 3: talking about how all of Donald Trump's political enemies aren't
Speaker 3: just happy going after him, but also going to be
Speaker 3: going after every Republican. And he said the greatest retribution
Speaker 3: will be our success. Yeah, and they've been using network
Speaker 3: a lot this year, retribution retribution.
Speaker 2: And you know, he did kind of in the end,
Speaker 2: getted a little bit of applause. That's it was like
Speaker 2: the fifth or sixth best standing ovation of the night.
Speaker 2: So again, at his best, was never able to really rile.
Speaker 3: Them up, especially when he's talking about assassination attempt. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 3: the crowd chounting fight.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what got them back on board and interesting.
Speaker 2: They loved talk about that, I think in part because
Speaker 2: it had been so absent earlier.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was talking about way more today than basically
Speaker 3: all the other days of the week combined.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and that makes sense. I mean, it was
Speaker 2: the day that Trump came out to speak, you know, and.
Speaker 3: You know what we're going to talk about now or
Speaker 3: not talk.
Speaker 2: About assassinating your thirst with hopefully a soda company advertising
Speaker 2: on the podcast. Otherwise this ad segue is not going
Speaker 2: to make much sense.
Speaker 3: All right. Time for Donald Trump himself, he's coming out.
Speaker 3: They they they set this stage, they got.
Speaker 2: Everything to be an American.
Speaker 3: And then they announced Kid.
Speaker 2: Rock, Oh my god, and he comes out and the
Speaker 2: whole stage is wreathed in massive screens, like dozens of
Speaker 2: feet tall, and they all are portraying fire and American.
Speaker 3: Flag, American flags that look kind of like they're on
Speaker 3: fire burning.
Speaker 2: Kid Rock comes out and does a rap set to
Speaker 2: burning American flags surrounding him.
Speaker 3: Just it was kind of just a fascinating image for
Speaker 3: the RNC.
Speaker 2: The refrain is they call me Cowboy. He said that
Speaker 2: like forty times, and he just kept going Trump, Trump, Trump, Fight, Fight, Fight, And.
Speaker 3: They loved it. They loved it. Was It was very
Speaker 3: high energy. It was it was a concert. Everyone everyone,
Speaker 3: everyone had a great time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, it got a good reaction. People were hyped up.
Speaker 2: It is the loudest, stupidest thing I have ever seen
Speaker 2: in my life, but it got a really good reaction.
Speaker 2: People loved kid Rock coming out. It's interesting to me
Speaker 2: that they chose to have kid Rock basically lead directly
Speaker 2: to the president rather than than the Hulkster. But I
Speaker 2: don't know. If I were if I had been setting
Speaker 2: this up, I would have done Franklin Graham, school Lady,
Speaker 2: Eric Trump, all the weak ones up first, and then
Speaker 2: probably Tucker the Hulkster, Kid Rock, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the NSC should really hire you to man their schedule.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm available, guys.
Speaker 3: So after we all kid rocked out, technically, Dana White
Speaker 3: gave the introduction or Dana White.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they bring in Dana White, who has who is
Speaker 2: the UFC CEO. Yeah, who is also on video hitting
Speaker 2: his wife in the face. This is not a debatable,
Speaker 2: he said. She said, he is on video. You can
Speaker 2: watch it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And he gave a very very very typical strength
Speaker 3: and security speech to introduced Trump, who emerged from behind
Speaker 3: one of the big the big screens.
Speaker 2: Well, proud to be an American plays and like the
Speaker 2: entire crowd stands up and they're all singing along to
Speaker 2: Proud to Be an American. They love that song.
Speaker 3: He'd started his speech, and one of the interesting things
Speaker 3: is that he said that he's going to tell the
Speaker 3: story of what happened at the assassination attempt here right now,
Speaker 3: but won't tell it ever again because it's too painful
Speaker 3: to tell.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll be interested to see how often he does,
Speaker 2: because it is like just based on his body language,
Speaker 2: because he's been out every night but not saying anything,
Speaker 2: and he does has looked a bit different, and I'm
Speaker 2: not going to do the whole thing. Some of the
Speaker 2: fucking you had some like Politico being like, it's a
Speaker 2: new Trump, He's become a statesman. They definitely that's what
Speaker 2: the RNC is trying to sell you on. That's nonsense.
Speaker 2: But he has changed in the way that like you
Speaker 2: would be if you were shot in the head and survived,
Speaker 2: you know, like anyone is go like, he's not a robot, right,
Speaker 2: Like anyone is going to be affected by that. And
Speaker 2: he might not have been lying. He might just have
Speaker 2: been like, look, I have to talk about this once.
Speaker 2: I really don't want to keep talking about this because
Speaker 2: it's fucked up.
Speaker 3: I mean one of the parts actually felt genuine. Were
Speaker 3: certain sections of this where he was like saying like,
Speaker 3: I'm I'm I was not supposed to be here tonight,
Speaker 3: and the crowd was like, yes you are.
Speaker 2: Yeah he was like no, no, no, really close.
Speaker 3: You know, he was thanking God. I don't know how
Speaker 3: genuine that is for him, and how much of that's
Speaker 3: political posture.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that I don't necessarily believe that.
Speaker 3: That's just kind of what you have to do.
Speaker 2: He certainly knows that he barely made it out of
Speaker 2: that fucking speech.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And he pointed to thessassination attempt as a sign
Speaker 3: of how divided this country has been. A very world
Speaker 3: trying to find the guy who did this moment, And
Speaker 3: he called the Democrats to stop the witch hunts if
Speaker 3: they want to unify the country, saying, quote, we must
Speaker 3: not demonize political disagreement, and the Democrats should quote stop
Speaker 3: weaponizing the Justice Department against Trump and labeling him an
Speaker 3: enemy of democracy. So he's saying, the way to actually
Speaker 3: unify this country is just to stop stopping bad. Yeah,
Speaker 3: stop saying orange man bad. That's really what he was,
Speaker 3: That's what he was getting at.
Speaker 2: Well, and I you know, you get if you want
Speaker 2: to see the things that you can gain from this
Speaker 2: that are useful in how to fight these people. They
Speaker 2: are scared of the attacks that portray Trump as an
Speaker 2: enemy of democracy. The Project twenty twenty five focus was
Speaker 2: hurting Republicans and polling and the fact that the dims
Speaker 2: have pulled back maybe not.
Speaker 3: Mentioned in a single speech this week.
Speaker 2: Yeah, nobody talked up twenty twenty five. You know, even
Speaker 2: the Heritage Foundation people were notably cagier about it than
Speaker 2: you might expect in their interviews with the press, because
Speaker 2: they do know that it's not a good it's not
Speaker 2: great for them to bring up now.
Speaker 3: It's not popular. Yeah, and you know, slowly Trump's speech
Speaker 3: got more more Trumpian rights, saying that Democrats are destroying
Speaker 3: our country, talking about you know, immigrants invading our country.
Speaker 3: As he said, he said there word invasion many many times. Yeah,
Speaker 3: saying that that there that saying that legal immigrants are
Speaker 3: killing hundreds of thousands of people a year.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the fentanyl thing. It's even though ninety fyl
Speaker 2: is brought into US sports of entry by US citizens. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that line actually was one of the through lines. That
Speaker 2: was almost every day of this I heard someone mention
Speaker 2: that we've lost as many or more Americans to fentanyl
Speaker 2: as we did in World War Two. At one point
Speaker 2: it might have been in Trump's speech. It was even
Speaker 2: framed as like more people have died from fentanyl than
Speaker 2: died in World War Two, and like, well, no, no, no, lot,
Speaker 2: a lot of people died in World War two, just
Speaker 2: not that many Americans. Really.
Speaker 3: Yeah, speaking of World War two era Germany in Trump's
Speaker 3: little section, we sure did get a mention there. In
Speaker 3: Trump's little section about inflation, he gave a fascinating comment, yeah, saying, quote,
Speaker 3: you can go back to Germany one hundred years ago
Speaker 3: unquote to see the negative effects of inflation, yea, pointing
Speaker 3: to like fin Maar era Germany.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you're talking about Vymar. He's talking about like
Speaker 2: what immediately preceded the Nazis coming to power.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and and but like also framing it is like
Speaker 3: I'll be the one to get us out of inflation,
Speaker 3: which is very similar messaging as the fascist movements did,
Speaker 3: saying to Germany that was in you know, in a
Speaker 3: real economic issue, we will be the ones to fix
Speaker 3: this through through nationalism, closing our borders through putting Germany first,
Speaker 3: like that is, it's, it's it was. It was a
Speaker 3: very very odd comparison for Trump to make. I don't
Speaker 3: know how well he thought through that. I don't believe
Speaker 3: that was this was like an intentional code admits it didn't.
Speaker 2: It didn't seem like.
Speaker 3: I don't think Trump works that way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he definitely does have teleprompters sometimes, but he also
Speaker 2: he is like a good public speaker. He doesn't just
Speaker 2: stick religious to it, you know, And that did strike
Speaker 2: me as a line that may have just come right
Speaker 2: out of the heart.
Speaker 3: Now, he had a few other interesting things in the economy.
Speaker 3: He was talking a lot about increasing car manufacturing jobs,
Speaker 3: including saying the leader of the United Autoworkers should be
Speaker 3: fired and promising to put tariffs of one hundred to
Speaker 3: two hundred percent on all foreign made cars, which would
Speaker 3: I'm sure do some real.
Speaker 2: Stuck up on your toyotas now, folks, well they make
Speaker 2: a lot of them in the US.
Speaker 3: I'm sure that would really help the economy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, which is like, I mean, part of the
Speaker 2: there's a lot to say about that. One thing that's interesting,
Speaker 2: someone had told you because you were the first person
Speaker 2: to bring this up to me. There were strong rumors
Speaker 2: that really a midday before the speech started percolating that
Speaker 2: Elon Musk was going to show up and introduce or
Speaker 2: introduce people.
Speaker 3: I heard this from like Thursday morning.
Speaker 2: Which may mean that they were just getting some bullshit.
Speaker 2: It may mean that there were actually talks, right, I'm
Speaker 2: sure because Musk has been real like Musk has been
Speaker 2: trying do get Trump's attention. Yeah, that's beyond debate.
Speaker 3: He wants Trump on Twitter m hm.
Speaker 2: And he wants Trump. You know. He's he's been making
Speaker 2: all these statements about how much money he's going to
Speaker 2: donate to Trump and now he's endorsing him. Now, do
Speaker 2: I actually think he's gonna give the RNC forty five
Speaker 2: million dollars a month? No, he's going to find some
Speaker 2: bullshit way he's gonna give him something. But he's gonna fight.
Speaker 2: He's he's he never spends gives like that's too much
Speaker 2: money for him to want to spend on them, right, Like,
Speaker 2: I think he's going to fuck them the way he
Speaker 2: fucks everybody over. But it was interesting to me how
Speaker 2: much talk there was of him showing up and absolutely
Speaker 2: no eel on And in fact, there was a moment
Speaker 2: where Trump was like, hey, electric cars are fine for
Speaker 2: some things, but like we got to subsidize gas cars.
Speaker 3: Yeah. He talked about, you know, increasing drilling in the
Speaker 3: United States and kind of the last big topic that
Speaker 3: he went to was the border. He pointed to the
Speaker 3: to the little border patrol chart that he looked at
Speaker 3: the split second before those shots fired, which saved his life,
Speaker 3: So you can thank the borderroll chart for that. He
Speaker 3: said that Mexico and South American countries are sending murderers
Speaker 3: and people from a sane asylums into the United States.
Speaker 2: It was interesting because Naibukele of El Salvador, it keeps
Speaker 2: getting brought up as like a Trumpian figure, is like,
Speaker 2: this is the kind of leader Trump wants to be.
Speaker 2: Look at how good he's done it, like stopping violent
Speaker 2: crime in El Salvador. Trump shat on him. Trump accused
Speaker 2: him of sending all of El Salvador's violent criminals and
Speaker 2: psychopaths to the United States, which I thought was interesting.
Speaker 3: Actually, was it El Salvador Venezuela.
Speaker 2: Both He brought up both because he also brought up
Speaker 2: Venezuela and accused them of doing that, he said El Salvador.
Speaker 2: But he also brought up Venezuela and said, maybe next
Speaker 2: election will hold the RNC in Venezuela because it's so
Speaker 2: peaceful now because they sent all their rapists here.
Speaker 3: Exactly that. Then he had the late great Hannibal Lecter line,
Speaker 3: and then immediately afterwards he said that he will enact
Speaker 3: the largest deportation program in American history. Yeah, and that's
Speaker 3: just what a very beautiful snapshot of the current American politican.
Speaker 2: And it got a great reaction. And I would say
Speaker 2: that by far the most aggressive, because he really didn't
Speaker 2: play any of that much of the much of if
Speaker 2: any radical left stuff. He really even didn't other than
Speaker 2: to say that Joe was like a bad president, the
Speaker 2: country was in bad shape. He didn't like yell at Democrats.
Speaker 2: Much hate was mostly reserved for migrants and immigrants.
Speaker 3: Yes. He closed by saying that we're going to be
Speaker 3: building an iron dome in the United States.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, that curveball.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And then he pivoted to saying that we will
Speaker 3: not have men playing in women's sports, which is the
Speaker 3: first trans reference.
Speaker 2: In his whole speech, and he just kind of dropped
Speaker 2: it and then changed.
Speaker 3: And then he immediately continued to something else, And the
Speaker 3: crowd did not react to that nearly as much as
Speaker 3: they reacted to any of the other mentions of like
Speaker 3: trans people.
Speaker 2: I think because it just kind of he just kind
Speaker 2: of threw it out there, but then we're right back to.
Speaker 3: It was almost like a perfunctory line, like knew he.
Speaker 2: Had again and drop a line about because I think
Speaker 2: it is perfunctory because again Trump doesn't really care all
Speaker 2: that much about the culture, like the social stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that is That's pretty much what they closed
Speaker 3: the speech on. Most mostly on this migrant stuff, this
Speaker 3: iron dome thing, and increase increasing the increasing the manufacturing
Speaker 3: jobs in the United States, which is you know, a
Speaker 3: lot of a lot of what Trump's messaging was back
Speaker 3: at twenty sixteen as well.
Speaker 2: So I mean, in a way, it was mostly him
Speaker 2: playing the hits. You know, we had the there was
Speaker 2: He did bring out Corey Contemporis firefighter's uniform. It was
Speaker 2: on stage behind him the whole time. He kissed it.
Speaker 3: At one point walked up to it and I thought
Speaker 3: he was gonna going for a hug, and I was like, oh,
Speaker 3: that's gonna be weird, and instead he went up behind
Speaker 3: and kissed it, which was also weird.
Speaker 2: It kind of did a Joe Biden to the Dead
Speaker 2: Man's It was firefighter.
Speaker 3: It was a very Joe Biden.
Speaker 2: And he brought up Corey. He brought also up the
Speaker 2: other people who were wounded. He named them all, which
Speaker 2: you know, you I makes sense, you have to do it.
Speaker 2: He didn't really talk much about Corey beyond that, like
Speaker 2: Corey was there as a prop. He kissed it, and
Speaker 2: then he.
Speaker 3: Gave a five second moment of silence, a very brief
Speaker 3: moment of silence.
Speaker 2: And then they moved on. And when his speech ended
Speaker 2: for the night, Garrison and I both saw this was
Speaker 2: beautiful moments to share with you, Garrett. You and I
Speaker 2: have shared some moments, but this was. This is right
Speaker 2: up at the top of the list as all of
Speaker 2: the the whole convention, the whole ceiling is balloons, right.
Speaker 2: They've got them up there. They have some sort of
Speaker 2: system by which like at the end they trigger it
Speaker 2: and they all start falling down and they'll fall for
Speaker 2: ten fifteen minutes. Like there's a lot of balloons and
Speaker 2: it's rigged so that they're and you know, some of
Speaker 2: them are red, white and blue. A lot of them
Speaker 2: are like gold.
Speaker 3: Huge gold balloons.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the last sight we get, you know, as
Speaker 2: as Trump is on stage with his family, balloons are
Speaker 2: showering the crowds everywhere streaming.
Speaker 3: They're celebrating what they see as as an inevitable victory.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Two stage crew guys take Corey's uniform and wheel
Speaker 2: it unceremoniously off stage into darkness as quietly wheel its
Speaker 2: balloons poured down and everyone dances and cheeers.
Speaker 3: No one, no one noticed.
Speaker 2: We're done. It's like Frank Grime's caskets sinking into the
Speaker 2: into the dirt, and the Simpsons like no one sees,
Speaker 2: one sees.
Speaker 3: Very unceremoniously, very quietly, very quickly just wheeled off and
Speaker 3: what we needed from him as the celebration continues. And
Speaker 3: also they spelled his name wrong on the firefighting uniform,
Speaker 3: to be it was previously spelled wrong.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's I think it was an issue of
Speaker 2: when he was a firefighter. They just could only have
Speaker 2: so many letters on the jackets. But you know, there
Speaker 2: was some talk about that. I have seen a lot
Speaker 2: of folks making the comparison to Horst Wessel, who was
Speaker 2: a German member of the Brown Shirts who's also a pimp,
Speaker 2: who gets got murdered by some communists in retaliation for
Speaker 2: acts of violence he had carried out right before the
Speaker 2: Third Reich took power, and they they really made a
Speaker 2: lot out of his death. He got this massive state funeral,
Speaker 2: They had a very popular song about him. He was
Speaker 2: kind of he was kind of the individual chosen to
Speaker 2: embody all of the guys who died in the street
Speaker 2: fights prior to the right of the party. And people
Speaker 2: have been comparing Corey to Horst. I get why, because
Speaker 2: this is we are watching a fascist party near power here,
Speaker 2: and there's clearly some desire in that for Corey to
Speaker 2: be that. Horst was the focus of almost I'm not
Speaker 2: almost a cult And what I saw here was a perfunctory, Well,
Speaker 2: we got to mention this guy. Uh, we got to like,
Speaker 2: you know, make a reference to him. But let's let's
Speaker 2: get in and out of that. We got to move
Speaker 2: on to the meat and potatoes. That's not gonna win us.
Speaker 2: And I think what is like the the swing voters
Speaker 2: and shit don't care about Corey contemporary right, that's not
Speaker 2: gonna that's our base is going to expect us to
Speaker 2: say something. It's also just like the thing you do.
Speaker 2: This guy got killed at your rally with a bulletmint
Speaker 2: for you, you got to bring up something. But then
Speaker 2: let's move on. Let's get him out of there, Let's
Speaker 2: shove his fucking uniform into the fucking back closet, and uh,
Speaker 2: get back to the party, you know. And that is
Speaker 2: different from how the Nazis handled horsed And I think
Speaker 2: that difference maybe it signals a real difference in the
Speaker 2: structure of American fascism, you know, and how it inhabits
Speaker 2: a party, or maybe it's just a measure of we're
Speaker 2: not all fully bought in on this to the extent
Speaker 2: in the same way that the Nazis were, right like,
Speaker 2: we really are trying to just get a lot of
Speaker 2: people on board to vote for us, and we don't
Speaker 2: want to get too weird with it. We don't want
Speaker 2: to have a big cult for Corey at the RNC,
Speaker 2: the big religious state. That's got to be off putting
Speaker 2: to Americans. So let's we'll kiss the hat people like firefighters,
Speaker 2: shove it back. That's how I took that.
Speaker 3: There's two other things I want to mention I've had JD.
Speaker 3: Vance's hype song stuck in my head. Boy, yeah, because
Speaker 3: they just kept playing it at that convention, and it's
Speaker 3: an interesting song. It has it has a good beat.
Speaker 3: It for most of the song, it's talking about how,
Speaker 3: you know, we spend all this time trying to like
Speaker 3: liberate other countries, right, and maybe actually we're the ones
Speaker 3: that need to be liberated. Maybe maybe America actually needs
Speaker 3: to be saved. Maybe we aren't as free as what
Speaker 3: we would think. And it has a line about like
Speaker 3: getting out of Iraq.
Speaker 2: We got to get out of we got to get
Speaker 2: out of Iraq, take our country back and put America first.
Speaker 3: And I mean that is the point that where they
Speaker 3: lose me. Obviously, it's still it's still interesting for one
Speaker 3: of them, Like for the Vice President's song at the
Speaker 3: RNC to be anti Iraqs. I'm like, hey, there there
Speaker 3: were people telling you back then not to do Iraq
Speaker 3: and you really wanted to.
Speaker 2: We heard it for the first time on Monday when
Speaker 2: Vance got officially announced as the nominee, and I kind
Speaker 2: of wondered, then, if like is this a fuck up?
Speaker 2: Was like somebody they were like, oh, there's a Merle
Speaker 2: Haggard song about America first, let's throw that in there,
Speaker 2: and then realized, oh no, there's we can't have that.
Speaker 2: We're the party who did the Iraq stuff. But it
Speaker 2: kept coming up, man kept being played. So it's very intentional, clearly.
Speaker 3: And we were talking last night about this and like
Speaker 3: how how this is how these tips sort of nationalist
Speaker 3: projects always work. And we we've seen more America first,
Speaker 3: like that, that exact phrase used at this convention way
Speaker 3: more than any any previous one. Trump said it a
Speaker 3: few times. A lot of speakers have been saying it,
Speaker 3: just like we need to put America first. And yeah,
Speaker 3: specifically in this song, you know, it has it has
Speaker 3: this kind of populist bent that then veers very hard nationalists,
Speaker 3: which I'm sure we're all familiar with as a political tendency.
Speaker 3: But I've just thought I found that to be the
Speaker 3: most interesting part is because for like the majority of
Speaker 3: that song, I'm like, yes, absolutely, I agree. And then
Speaker 3: and and then they say the America first line, and
Speaker 3: it's like, oh, that is not that is not what
Speaker 3: we're talking about. It's yeah, and I just know it's
Speaker 3: it's it's been something I've been thinking about and I'm
Speaker 3: sure we'll want I'm sure we'll do some more deep
Speaker 3: dives on Vance in the coming weeks, since he's a
Speaker 3: little bit, you know, less well known to many of you,
Speaker 3: I assume. And the the last thing I kind of
Speaker 3: want to mention is that yesterday, right before Trump's speech,
Speaker 3: I was getting some work done and I happened to
Speaker 3: be sitting about ten feet away from Ted Cruz, who
Speaker 3: was who is talking on air about his thoughts on
Speaker 3: like both this this convention and this election in general.
Speaker 3: And he said a few interesting things that I half
Speaker 3: heard that I that I quickly just scribbled down on
Speaker 3: a notebook. He said that, you know this, this convention
Speaker 3: already feels like a celebration, right, this already feels like
Speaker 3: like we've kind of won. But he warned Republicans to
Speaker 3: be scared of over confidence. He said that we're kind
Speaker 3: of acting like how the Democrats were acting in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 2: I have been saying that all week.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's that's what Ted Cruz was saying. Yeah.
Speaker 3: He thinks that that that Biden is not going to
Speaker 3: be the candidate, that someone else is going to come
Speaker 3: into place.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 3: He believes that that's going to be Michelle Obama, which
Speaker 3: is believable in an unhinged opinions.
Speaker 2: Unbelievable because like, do I think Michelle Obama would have
Speaker 2: a decent shot at winning the presidency in this election?
Speaker 2: And sure, do I think Michelle Obama wants to go
Speaker 2: anywhere near the White House again in her life?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 2: Absolute, it's like a nightmare. She's making movies, they're produced,
Speaker 2: they're in Hollywood. You're doing the thing people when.
Speaker 3: They're doing what Ted Cruz wants to do.
Speaker 2: When people are allowed to make big Hollywood movies, they
Speaker 2: don't want to get into politics for a long time.
Speaker 2: That's how we avoided having fascists and power in this
Speaker 2: country and like like direct power, like like Trump type
Speaker 2: kind of fascists.
Speaker 3: We're very lucky that Clint Eastwood just makes movies and
Speaker 3: doesn't do.
Speaker 2: Are the people who would be the best we have?
Speaker 2: You know, you have fascists like stuck inside of the bureaucracy,
Speaker 2: But the people who could really have the potential charisma
Speaker 2: to be populist leaders wind up becoming movie stars. Tom
Speaker 2: Cruise could have been a president. Oh he's he's got
Speaker 2: what it takes, but he decided to devote all of
Speaker 2: that manic kind of charisma energy into climbing the bersh Khalifa.
Speaker 2: And that's part of the genius of the American system.
Speaker 3: And I mean, guess lastly, Milwaukee was lovely. All the
Speaker 3: food service workers Milwaukee's great. Even the poor people who
Speaker 3: were forced to work at the convention center consistently nice,
Speaker 3: did a great job. And there's there's one one anecdote
Speaker 3: that Robert should mention.
Speaker 2: Just regardless of a favorite part of the convention, some
Speaker 2: of the.
Speaker 3: Very fine people here in Milwaukee.
Speaker 2: I've gotten shouted my my occasional enemy, well always enemy,
Speaker 2: but occasionally I remember that he exists. Andy No made
Speaker 2: a series of posts about how there was a dangerous
Speaker 2: Antifa terrorist at the convention and like clipped a couple
Speaker 2: of posts of mine out of context like he always does,
Speaker 2: and was like, you know, people in his in his
Speaker 2: mentions were tagging the Secret Service.
Speaker 3: In THEBN it serves Laura Lumer.
Speaker 2: I continued to repeatedly enter the r n C. I
Speaker 2: went through. God, I lost count of how many times
Speaker 2: I went through Secret Service checkpoints. We snuck into the
Speaker 2: hair Ridage Foundation party. None of it mattered. The only
Speaker 2: people at the show who recognized me were like technical
Speaker 2: folks for the different radio. I had a couple of
Speaker 2: different people who were carrying booms carrying cameras who like referenced,
Speaker 2: like recognized me and shouted me out, which I felt
Speaker 2: good about. What I felt best about is as you
Speaker 2: and I were walking to the stadium to see the speech,
Speaker 2: we see a forklift driving down the street in the
Speaker 2: middle of this one of the crowded streets. Yeah, which
Speaker 2: is kind of crazy. It's weird. I've never actually seen
Speaker 2: a construction vehicle driving around inside the during like the
Speaker 2: convention hours, so that was weird. And as we're like
Speaker 2: watching this thing, like I honestly wondered, like, should I
Speaker 2: like get a footage of this? That's kind of wild looking?
Speaker 2: As were as we see it like kind of coming
Speaker 2: up next to us, the driver leans out of the
Speaker 2: side of the vehicle and he is a beautiful man
Speaker 2: covered in tattoos, huge nos ring and he's like.
Speaker 3: Hey, Roberts, we have the demographic.
Speaker 2: Nothing has ever made me so certain that we're doing
Speaker 2: the right thing with our lives. We're reaching the people
Speaker 2: we need to be reaching.
Speaker 3: You know, we forklift certified soldiers out there so Forklift Nation.
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to it could happen here.
Speaker 3: We do this for you.
Speaker 2: We do this for you. We know you have our
Speaker 2: backs and we have your back.
Speaker 3: Stay save everybody.
Speaker 2: Yeah, God bless.
Speaker 5: Hello, Welcome to It could happen here? Another food episode.
Speaker 5: How did we get here today? We're talking about asparagus.
Speaker 5: Why you might ask, once again, you can blame James
Speaker 5: Stout Hi James.
Speaker 4: Hi, Cheren. I'm happy to be blamed. I take responsibility
Speaker 4: for asparagus.
Speaker 5: Why did you want me to talk about asparagus?
Speaker 4: Well, it's because Shereen I grew up in the vyl
Speaker 4: Aviv Sham. The vyl Aviv Sham, if people aren't familiar,
Speaker 4: is an area in the middle of England where asparagus
Speaker 4: has grown heavily. In fact, there's a protected origin, so
Speaker 4: you could only call it vel Aviv Shum asparagus if
Speaker 4: it comes. Yeah, there was a big asparagus auction that
Speaker 4: used to happen the first the first so around it's
Speaker 4: called grass and not asparagus. Right, Where's I'll get into that? Yeah, good, good,
Speaker 4: excited to Then it's so do you know how many
Speaker 4: how many spears are in a round?
Speaker 2: Sreen.
Speaker 5: No, let's say no.
Speaker 4: Okay, it's a gross, a gross of spears, so it gross.
Speaker 4: How many do you know how many in a gross? No,
Speaker 4: it is one hundred and forty four. It's twelve times twelve.
Speaker 6: Wow.
Speaker 4: So there's a pub called the Round of Grass. We
Speaker 4: scot a lot. When I was younger, I used to work.
Speaker 4: If anyone knows it high maybe you probably know me.
Speaker 4: It's small fan to my mum, who is probably the
Speaker 4: only person I used to work to stand the road
Speaker 4: from there at a tomato like a big tomato greenhouse.
Speaker 5: You used to work at a tomato greenhouse.
Speaker 4: Yep, yep, pack up the tomatoes. Slap a label on
Speaker 4: that bad boy, sat. It's such a crap job, Like
Speaker 4: I mean, it doesn't say no disrespect if you work
Speaker 4: in the tomato greenhouse and that's what you enjoy, Like,
Speaker 4: that's great, Like I love to grow a tomato. That
Speaker 4: job was just not I didn't like it. The same
Speaker 4: thing every day.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. Well, well, today is not
Speaker 5: a tomato episode. Today is an asparagus episode. Let's just
Speaker 5: get into it. I want you to talk more about
Speaker 5: your hometown, but I'm gonna sprinkle it in here and there.
Speaker 5: Just to make these more interesting, Let's just get into
Speaker 5: the nitty gritty of what asparagus is. Apparently, the asparagus
Speaker 5: is a member of the lily family. The plant is
Speaker 5: made up of the top, which is the fern, the
Speaker 5: crowns which are the buds, and then the roots. All
Speaker 5: three of these parts are vital to a productive asparagus plant.
Speaker 5: The fern is known as the factory, which through photosynthesis,
Speaker 5: produces food sorted in the crown and their roots below ground.
Speaker 5: The number of vigorous spears in the spring depends on
Speaker 5: the amount of food produced and stored in the crown
Speaker 5: during the preceding summer and fall. Producing a good crop
Speaker 5: of fern is necessary for ensuring a good crop of
Speaker 5: spears the following spring. It's important not to cut the
Speaker 5: old fern at the end of the season until it
Speaker 5: is completely dead, and the best time to remove old
Speaker 5: fern is in the spring, since valuable food and nutrients
Speaker 5: move during the autumn months from the dying fern to
Speaker 5: the crown. Fascinating, Yeah, maybe you're wondering is there a
Speaker 5: nutritional value? Yes, of course it's a vegetable, But one
Speaker 5: cup of asparagus has no fat and only two grays
Speaker 5: of sugar and three milligrams of salt. Apparently, it's known
Speaker 5: as one of the most nutritionally balanced vegetables ever, a
Speaker 5: lot of fiber, and it contains no cholesterol, very low
Speaker 5: in sodium, as I said, a good source of folic acid, potassium,
Speaker 5: as well as vitamin's A A six and vitamin C. Wowie, Yeah,
Speaker 5: only the young shoots of asparagus are eaten. Fun fact.
Speaker 5: There's also an amino acid called asparagene, and this gets
Speaker 5: its name from asparagus because the asparagus plant is rich
Speaker 5: in this compound. Asparagene is also commonly found fun fact
Speaker 5: in French fries and potatoes, which are potatoes and fries
Speaker 5: are the same. There are over three hundred known varieties
Speaker 5: of asparagus, and the varieties most widely seen in the
Speaker 5: United States include the white variety, which is preferred in Europe.
Speaker 5: I'll get into this later, but apparently chefs in Europe
Speaker 5: only usually use white James.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well that's the mainland Europe. Maybe now that we've exited, obviously,
Speaker 4: we can be proud of our green asparagus. I've not
Speaker 4: enjoyed white asparagus. I think it lacks fresh, the fresh flavor.
Speaker 5: There's a reason for that. There's a reason for that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they pile up the soil, right, so yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well spoiler alert, I was going to call it
Speaker 5: is very fascinating that they prefer to do that, though,
Speaker 5: But regardless, the three varieties in the United States include
Speaker 5: the white one, and these sunlight deprived stocks are a
Speaker 5: little milder and more delicate. It's difficult to find these
Speaker 5: fresh in the US, but they are widely available canned
Speaker 5: or in jars.
Speaker 4: They don't want to be eating a sparis in a
Speaker 4: can or a jar, though.
Speaker 5: I mean, you don't want to be eating most things
Speaker 5: in a canna a jar.
Speaker 4: That's pretic. A sardine if you're a person who eats
Speaker 4: sardines very good in a.
Speaker 5: Can, I'm not going to do a hardy an episode.
Speaker 4: That could be a really interesting episode. I used to
Speaker 4: live in a place where they had a protected origin
Speaker 4: for those as well.
Speaker 5: You know, after doing sea your Chins, I was glad
Speaker 5: to do asparagus because asparagus, says, are not little think things.
Speaker 5: I'm not trying to be annoying, but I think it's
Speaker 5: hard for me to talk about things like eating.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5: About them because they are food, but they're not my
Speaker 5: first choice. So I'm glad to be talking about a
Speaker 5: plant today. I don't find asparagus cute, so maybe it's
Speaker 5: easier for me to eat them. That's that's just my
Speaker 5: own bias.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I didn't derail your episode. I've been reminded that
Speaker 4: I had my twenty first birthday party at one of
Speaker 4: the pubs at Auctions. The asparagus. Wow, tidbit.
Speaker 5: I love some James Stout Loore.
Speaker 4: Forget in the varn, in the varn at the fleece
Speaker 4: at Breadforton. The other one, of course, is around the
Speaker 4: grass and batsy.
Speaker 5: Wow, fascinating. Your life continues to be fascinating.
Speaker 4: That's extremely fucking mundane.
Speaker 5: It's fucking weird in a good way. But sure they're
Speaker 5: the other variety, the violet or purple kind of asparagus.
Speaker 5: This one is commonly found in England and Italy and
Speaker 5: it has a very substantial stock. And then is the
Speaker 5: green asparagus, which is the most widely known kind of asparagus,
Speaker 5: because most American asparagus is of this variety, and it
Speaker 5: ranges from pencil thin to very thick. They describe it
Speaker 5: as the size of your thumb, but I think this
Speaker 5: is relative, depending on how big your thumb is. And
Speaker 5: then there's also wild asparagus, and these asparagus grow in
Speaker 5: wild areas. It's mostly found in Europe or like on
Speaker 5: the coastline somewhere, and you'll most likely have to hunt
Speaker 5: down your own because it's rarely available fresh in markets
Speaker 5: except for in Italy and the south of France.
Speaker 4: No, wild asparagus is great, it's going to be. Uh,
Speaker 4: you do have to be as with anything that you're
Speaker 4: taking out of the out of the wild areas. You
Speaker 4: do want to be careful that you're getting wild asparagus.
Speaker 4: We are a couple of things because if you confuse
Speaker 4: it with something else, oh, I mean yeah you can
Speaker 4: can Yeah, you can get yourself. I'm trying to remember.
Speaker 5: Yeah, don't be like into the wild out here, like yeah.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, don't into the world yourself with a world asparagus.
Speaker 4: Samfa is another delicious vegetable. It's a bit like I
Speaker 4: think it's a relative of asparagus. It's like sea asparagus
Speaker 4: s a m p h ire.
Speaker 5: Wow, see asparagus.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so many little Yeah, fascinating. It's I think it's
Speaker 4: a maybe it's not a relative. Maybe it's just a
Speaker 4: like a seaweed. It's pretty good if you get it.
Speaker 4: That's one you can forage pretty easily. Nearly all seaweeds edible,
Speaker 4: So you know, if you're out and about.
Speaker 5: Good source of iodine, I'm sure.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Well yeah, But.
Speaker 5: As with any plant, James, asparagus has its own ideas.
Speaker 3: It's called sea beans.
Speaker 4: Well, sorry, I'm just sorry, ten, I've ruined your episode
Speaker 4: sea beans? No, yes, what fucking Americans call it? What
Speaker 4: a stupid name?
Speaker 5: I mean, you do ruin moost things?
Speaker 4: Yeah, Like, I don't know. It's a little two too straightforward.
Speaker 4: It's literally mentioned in king Lear Like, why do you
Speaker 4: have to change it? Shakespearean vegetable?
Speaker 5: M Well, today is about asparagus. Today, we're talking about asparagus.
Speaker 5: A sea bean maybe next time. But James, as with
Speaker 5: any plant, the asparagus has its own ideal growing conditions.
Speaker 5: So let's get into that. Where is an ideal growing
Speaker 5: condition for an asparagus? A good amount of sun is ideal.
Speaker 5: Asparagus needs at least eight hours of sun per day.
Speaker 5: And since asparagus is a long lived perennial plant. It
Speaker 5: should not be planted where trees or tall shrubs might
Speaker 5: eventually shade the plants or compete for nutrients and water.
Speaker 5: When it comes to the soil, the crown and root
Speaker 5: system can grow to a large size, which can be
Speaker 5: roughly five to six feet in diameter and ten to
Speaker 5: fifteen feet deep. Therefore, when possible, you should select a
Speaker 5: soil that is loose, deep, well drained, and fertile. On
Speaker 5: sites with poor soil, incorporate manure and compost into the
Speaker 5: soil and plant until under two successive cover crops the
Speaker 5: season before you plant your asparagus, and you should be
Speaker 5: just fine. Asparagus is planted in the spring. The simplest
Speaker 5: method is to plant one year old crowns and you
Speaker 5: lay down the ground soil prior to growing asparagus for
Speaker 5: the first time. And even though the young crown will
Speaker 5: appear to be a lifeless mass of roots, it will
Speaker 5: begin to send up small green shoots shortly after planting,
Speaker 5: so as I mentioned, asparagus is planted in the spring,
Speaker 5: but it's also one of the very first crops harvested
Speaker 5: during the spring season, and that means metaphorically, It represents
Speaker 5: the transition from the frozen winter months and its emphasis
Speaker 5: on root vegetables to the abundance and newness of spring. Yeah,
Speaker 5: asparagus for farmers can mean even more. Farmer Lee Jones
Speaker 5: from The Chef's Garden says quote, the farmer is an
Speaker 5: eternal optimist, always hoping that next year will be the year,
Speaker 5: the year when rain falls and exactly the right amounts
Speaker 5: at exactly the right times, that it's never too hot
Speaker 5: and never too cold, and the weather is exactly what
Speaker 5: we might wish. No season is ever perfect, of course,
Speaker 5: but try telling that to a farmer as he or
Speaker 5: she sits in front of a cozy fireplace in the wintertime,
Speaker 5: feet propped up, looking through seed catalogs and dreaming of spring.
Speaker 5: Winter refreshes us, and asparagus represents the hope of renewal
Speaker 5: and the optimism of what spring might bring. When it's
Speaker 5: time to begin harvesting asparagus, farmers smell the earth again,
Speaker 5: see the earthworms, and listen once again to the kill
Speaker 5: deer in the blackbirds. This portent of spring is a
Speaker 5: welcome celebration. Asparagus is a recurrent affirmation that winter is
Speaker 5: over and delicious treasures from the field are eminent. This
Speaker 5: man loves asparagus.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that is farmers. Apparently it's not my recollection of winter.
Speaker 4: This man has never been very wet, very cold.
Speaker 5: I suppose not.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, doing a Christmas lamming.
Speaker 5: I suppose you can think of asparagus as a very
Speaker 5: patient vegetable. It rests quietly underground, absorbing nutrients from the
Speaker 5: soil and remaining underground during the freezing winter months before
Speaker 5: it begins to push through the soil when it's warm
Speaker 5: in the springtime, and this again signals the start of
Speaker 5: the spring season. In nineteen fifty six, The New York
Speaker 5: Times published an article calling asparagus the healthy quote spring
Speaker 5: tonic for weary appetites. I just thought it was a
Speaker 5: fun facts. That's that's all for that. Asparagus can grow
Speaker 5: quite fast too. You can cut asparagus in the morning
Speaker 5: and it just keeps growing. And here's a fun fact
Speaker 5: for you. In ideal conditions, asparagus can grow ten inches
Speaker 5: in a twenty four hour period.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's crazy, that's fast. It takes a long time
Speaker 4: to get ready, right, it takes three years and then
Speaker 4: it just.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, look, it's definitely an investment of time
Speaker 5: for it to grow that way. But it sounds like
Speaker 5: it's worth it if you love asparagus, like farmer le
Speaker 5: Jones up there.
Speaker 4: Yeah he does, do yount another little vale of eves
Speaker 4: in factoid. Please The church in Bredfton has a stained
Speaker 4: glass window which is a glass of asparagus.
Speaker 7: No, it doesn't.
Speaker 4: It's a depiction of asparagus. I will find it for you.
Speaker 5: Sure like asparagus, says Jesus.
Speaker 4: No, it's just asparagus in the window. Oh like, it's
Speaker 4: not how it is.
Speaker 5: Not less weird. I don't know if that's less weirder
Speaker 5: or not.
Speaker 4: But I'm just gotta find it for you here. Well
Speaker 4: it's is grass underneath. I'll just drop it in the chat.
Speaker 4: Get a live react.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I had a little twine wrapped around it too.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, yeah, Well that's how you do a round
Speaker 4: of grass. Yeah, you do them in dozens, right, and
Speaker 4: then a dozen dozen you wrap around.
Speaker 5: That's that's a stained glass depiction of asparagus.
Speaker 4: Okay, yeahparagus is next to godliness.
Speaker 5: Oh I'm getting into why that might be the case.
Speaker 5: So just to reiterate how much patience and time you yourself
Speaker 5: need if you do want to plant asparagus, because although
Speaker 5: green asparagus is typically what's seen in grocery stores, it
Speaker 5: comes in all the colors that we said, But no
Speaker 5: matter what it is, it's important to protect the strength
Speaker 5: of the root or else it won't succeed in growing.
Speaker 5: And this is how gentle you need to be. First,
Speaker 5: you plant the three year old roots, and if the
Speaker 5: asparagus root is in its first year in growth, which
Speaker 5: is really then it's fourth, you should only pick it
Speaker 5: for one week because you don't want to zap the
Speaker 5: root strength. Then after two years, which would be really
Speaker 5: its fifth, you pick it only for two weeks. By
Speaker 5: the time it's four years old, which yes means that's
Speaker 5: a seven year total, then you can harvest it for
Speaker 5: longer amounts of time a good plant though, after all,
Speaker 5: this process can last up to twenty years, so it's
Speaker 5: important to let the young ones build up strength for
Speaker 5: the future. We mentioned this before James gave it away.
Speaker 5: But in Europe chefs almost always use the white asparagus,
Speaker 5: rarely the green ones, and this is because the white
Speaker 5: asparagus beautifully offers up the luscious notes apparently of corn
Speaker 5: and sweet cabbage, but European farmers. The reason why this
Speaker 5: is is that they mound and pack soil over the
Speaker 5: asparagus plants to blow the chlorophyll process, and this is
Speaker 5: the process that ends up creating the white color when
Speaker 5: you block it. And these plants need to push hard
Speaker 5: through the soil and because of that, they end up
Speaker 5: with tough outer skins that need to be peeled off,
Speaker 5: which is not the case with the green variety. And
Speaker 5: then this adds labor like expenses and time into the
Speaker 5: mix of harvesting it. And a lot of people think
Speaker 5: that this results in the most nutritional part of the
Speaker 5: vegetable being thrown away.
Speaker 4: So why, yeah, why you dan't get It's one of
Speaker 4: the things that wrong about.
Speaker 5: Here are some more fun facts. Chefs say that to
Speaker 5: enjoy the bright green flavor of asparagus, you salt your
Speaker 5: water before blanching, and then, since the ends of asparagus
Speaker 5: are extremely tough, the best way to prepare the asparagus
Speaker 5: is a snap the ends off, which you probably already know,
Speaker 5: but you usually can find a slight bend where it
Speaker 5: can be broken off and this will preserve the most
Speaker 5: asparagus possible.
Speaker 4: You want to have a good snap though. If it's
Speaker 4: like it is fun.
Speaker 5: When that happens, I like like a good satisfying snap sound.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's when you know it's a fresh one. If
Speaker 4: it's if it's got like a squeeze. If it was floppy,
Speaker 4: then it's probably it's been out for too long. You
Speaker 4: have to eat it very fresh. It's very important. They
Speaker 4: would drive out to London, get me in a really
Speaker 4: early morning, drive up to London and sell it to
Speaker 4: look at London people, of which I'm not one, and
Speaker 4: then they would have there it's very luxury vegetable.
Speaker 5: Wow.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it is not a cheap vegetable.
Speaker 5: I'm going to get into the royalty of this vegetable
Speaker 5: that has been called the King of vegetables. But first
Speaker 5: we're going to take a break. So hm, go grab
Speaker 5: some asparagus and we'll be right back. And we're back,
Speaker 5: let's talk about some history of asparagus. The exact origins
Speaker 5: of asparagus are hard to pinpoint, although it is known
Speaker 5: to the eastern Mediterranean and parts of Asia. Asparagus can
Speaker 5: be found naturalized in many parts of the world today,
Speaker 5: and it is unclear exactly when it was naturalized how
Speaker 5: long the plant has been used as a medicinal vegetable
Speaker 5: is also uncertain, but it was known and highly prized
Speaker 5: by the Romans since at least two hundred BC. The
Speaker 5: Romans were apparently very knowledgeable about the difference in quality
Speaker 5: and the difference in varieties that they experimented with, and
Speaker 5: they knew the best places to grow the crop. The
Speaker 5: most popular way that the Romans enjoyed to prepare their
Speaker 5: asparagus was to pick it, let it dry, and then
Speaker 5: when they wanted to eat it, they would simply cook
Speaker 5: it for a few minutes. Ancient royalty seemed fascinated with asparagus.
Speaker 5: Roman emperor Caesar Augustus was said to have organized elite
Speaker 5: military units to search out this vegetable. He would then
Speaker 5: locate the fastest runners to take the fresh asparagus spears
Speaker 5: into the frozen alps for storage purposes. Ancient Greeks meanwhile
Speaker 5: harvested wild asparagus and connected this vegetable to their goddess
Speaker 5: of life of Aphrodite. Numerous other cultures have also considered
Speaker 5: this freshly sprouted asparagus a symbol of fertility, and so
Speaker 5: the history of asparagus goes back a very long long way,
Speaker 5: and speaking of the Greeks. The derivation of the word
Speaker 5: asparagus also gives us some idea of its early history.
Speaker 5: So asparagus was first cultivated some people think around twenty
Speaker 5: five hundred years ago in Greece, and this is significant
Speaker 5: because the word asparagus is a Greek word which means
Speaker 5: stock or shoot, and so it makes sense that the
Speaker 5: word is rooted in ancient Greek. But that word in
Speaker 5: ancient Greek is actually aspharagos, and it can be identified
Speaker 5: in various literature with two meanings. The first is found
Speaker 5: in Homer's Iliad, and it is used in this context
Speaker 5: to mean throat or gullet. The second place it's found,
Speaker 5: it's referred to as the edible shoots of stone or spirite.
Speaker 5: The Greeks believed asparagus was an herbal medicine, which, among
Speaker 5: other things, would cure toothaches and prevent beastings. We have
Speaker 5: seen reference to the fact that at one point this
Speaker 5: Greek word refer to the young edible shoots of any
Speaker 5: plant that shoots up from the earth, but we cannot
Speaker 5: verify this fact. So maybe in the area of ancient
Speaker 5: Greece known as Biotia, historians say that quote. After veiling
Speaker 5: the bride, they would put on her head a chaplet
Speaker 5: of asparagus. For this plant yields the finest flavored fruit
Speaker 5: from the roughest thorns. So the bride will provide him
Speaker 5: who does not run away or feel annoyed at her
Speaker 5: first display of peevishness or unpleasantness, a docile and sweet
Speaker 5: life together.
Speaker 4: Okay, Yeah, feminism alive. Well, yeah, I didn't know I
Speaker 4: was going to be suggesting an anti woke vegetable.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's a little bit of Returney.
Speaker 4: You don't have to be anti woke asparagus.
Speaker 5: No, you don't. You don't. Now, it's it's come a
Speaker 5: long way.
Speaker 4: It's come.
Speaker 5: Let's take back asparagus.
Speaker 4: We'll start there. It's like you have small steps.
Speaker 5: Other ancient cultures that apparently were obsessed with asparagus. The
Speaker 5: asparagus plant appeared in an Egyptian freeze about five thousand
Speaker 5: years ago, with Queen Nefertidi allegedly an asparagus fan. Archaeologists
Speaker 5: found traces of asparagus on dishware when they were excavating
Speaker 5: the Pyramid of Sakara, along with other coveted foods like
Speaker 5: figs and melons. Apparently, in the Egyptian culture, this vegtiable
Speaker 5: was considered sacred and use in religious ceremonies, and then
Speaker 5: in ancient China, honored guests were treated upon their arrivals
Speaker 5: with an asparagus foot bath.
Speaker 3: Don't either.
Speaker 5: Its uses are renowned and wide. About two thousand years ago,
Speaker 5: a poet in Latin language prose writer and Platonist philosopher
Speaker 5: named a Pelais fell in love with a well the
Speaker 5: widow named Pundentilla. Knowing he needed to pull out all
Speaker 5: the stops to get her, he wooed her with a
Speaker 5: special dish that contained asparagus along with crabtails, fish eggs,
Speaker 5: bird's tongue, and dove blood. He was accused of using
Speaker 5: magic charms to win her heart, and even though he
Speaker 5: successfully defended himself against his accusations, through this story we
Speaker 5: can clearly see there is certainly something magical about asparagus.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm concerned about crabtail.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: As I read that, I was like, as I read that,
Speaker 5: I was like, that's not a thing, But maybe it
Speaker 5: used to be. You know it, I'll be my next episode. Yeah,
Speaker 5: maybe that, maybe that's the case. Basically, a seafood little
Speaker 5: guy with fish eggs and crab also bird's tongue and
Speaker 5: dove blood.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a bit weighed. He loves me on that,
Speaker 4: to be honest.
Speaker 5: Yeah, romantic.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I've assumed. Coming to the asparagus recipe section, not
Speaker 4: yet later in the podcast, I will let you proceed.
Speaker 5: Let me just assume through the rest of us really quick.
Speaker 5: When Emperor Charles the fifth of the powerful Habsburg Empire,
Speaker 5: decided to visit Rome, and he was live between fifteen
Speaker 5: hundred and fifteen fifty eight, he visited Rome without warning
Speaker 5: any one of his arrival. A sense of panic ensued
Speaker 5: because the emperor had arrived during a time of fasting.
Speaker 5: One clever cardinal sent cooks to work in creating three
Speaker 5: different asparagus recipes. They set the plates on perfumed cloths
Speaker 5: and offered the emperor three exquisite wines. He was said
Speaker 5: to praise the delicacies, and he was offered for years
Speaker 5: to come. And so for centuries people have talked about asparagus,
Speaker 5: and they've also included asparagus in their Eastern dinners because
Speaker 5: of its fast growth in the spring and how this
Speaker 5: can symbolize resurrection. The book quote a Curious History of
Speaker 5: Vegetables by Wolf D. Storl has numerous asparagus anecdotes to
Speaker 5: enjoy if you're into that sort of thing, and also
Speaker 5: contains this quote by modern day plant experts Fritz Martin Engel.
Speaker 5: And this quote effectively sums up the types of people
Speaker 5: who have appreciated asparagus over the centuries. Quote pharaohs, emperors, kings,
Speaker 5: generals and great spiritual leaders, princely poets like Gota and
Speaker 5: gormands like Brelant severan, all of them ate and eat
Speaker 5: asparagus with great enthusiasm. Let's get into the word. As
Speaker 5: I mentioned earlier, it comes from the Greek word asparagos.
Speaker 5: Gos is the end of that. So the word asparagus
Speaker 5: was eventually developed into the word asparagus in classical Latin,
Speaker 5: but then it was shortened to sparagus without the A
Speaker 5: in medieval Latin. According to the World of Wide Words,
Speaker 5: it first appeared in English around one thousand a d.
Speaker 5: And then by the sixteenth century it was commonly referred
Speaker 5: to an English as sperrich or sparage. At this point
Speaker 5: in time, similar to other English language developments, there was
Speaker 5: a reversion back to classical Latin roots that was encouraged
Speaker 5: by academics and herbalists, so asparagus came back into use
Speaker 5: with the A, but when it came to common use,
Speaker 5: the A was still dropped, and people called it asparagus, sparrograss, sparrowgrass,
Speaker 5: and then also just grass, which was another shortening that
Speaker 5: people still use today. After the demise of the Roman Empire,
Speaker 5: little is heard of regarding the history of asparagus for
Speaker 5: a while, but evidence suggests that asparagus was being grown
Speaker 5: in French monasteries in fourteen fifty nine, but then it's
Speaker 5: unheard of in England or Germany until the mid fifteen hundreds.
Speaker 5: By the sixteenth century, asparagus starts to appear in history
Speaker 5: books again, where a gained popularity in France and England.
Speaker 5: From there, the early colonists brought it to America. The
Speaker 5: French were the main exports of the crop at the time,
Speaker 5: and if you wanted to please the Son King aka
Speaker 5: King Louis the fourteenth of France, you can bring his
Speaker 5: second wife, Madame de Matin sorry a new asparagus recipe,
Speaker 5: and apparently that was very pleasing to him. She gathered
Speaker 5: them into a book and asparagus soup a la matinan
Speaker 5: is still prized today. Asparagus is also because of this
Speaker 5: called food of the Kings, and kinglu With the fourteenth
Speaker 5: was so fond of asparagus that he ordered special greenhouses
Speaker 5: built so we can enjoy asparagus all year round.
Speaker 4: Me and Louis the fourteenth just cometic on how me
Speaker 4: and Louis the fourteenth. Yeah, same dude, many ways love
Speaker 4: get asparagus.
Speaker 5: Res Oh you were like handshaking yourself.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I did not catch that. Yeah, got it.
Speaker 5: The medicinal virtues that are attributed to asparagus are a
Speaker 5: wide range. The roots, sprouts, and seeds were used as medicine.
Speaker 5: The fresh roots are a diuretic. A syrup made from
Speaker 5: the young shoots, and an extract of the roots has
Speaker 5: been recommended as a sedative in heart issues. Among Greeks
Speaker 5: and Romans. It is one of the oldest and most
Speaker 5: valued medicines. It was believed that if a person anointed
Speaker 5: himself with a liniment or liquid medicine made of asparagus
Speaker 5: and oil, that bees would not approach or sting him.
Speaker 5: I mentioned this kind of briefly earlier, but that's.
Speaker 2: How you do it.
Speaker 5: Don't get stung by a bee, coat yourself with asparagus juice.
Speaker 5: It was also believed that if the root is put
Speaker 5: on a tooth that aches violently, it causes it to
Speaker 5: fall out without any pain if you want that to happen.
Speaker 5: But how did the asparagus cross the Atlantic? There is
Speaker 5: little evidence of when exactly asparagus migrate over to the Americas,
Speaker 5: and again it's assumed that settlers brought it over along
Speaker 5: with other vegetables at the time. It's believed that in
Speaker 5: the seventeen hundreds it was planted initially in New England,
Speaker 5: and then by the eighteen fifties it had found its
Speaker 5: way to North California. There is early evidence, based on
Speaker 5: seed catalogs, of the crop being sold on a commercial
Speaker 5: level in the early eighteenth century in eastern parts of
Speaker 5: the country. While asparagus, as we mentioned earlier is a
Speaker 5: thing and it's seen as early as the nineteenth century,
Speaker 5: it can be growing along the East Coast in scattered
Speaker 5: locations and across temperate North America, and apparently thirty six
Speaker 5: states have reported to have wild asparagus. Another kingly reference
Speaker 5: of asparagus is apparently in Germany. Asparagus was called Spargl.
Speaker 5: Spargol took cold in Germany around Stuttgart in the sixteenth century,
Speaker 5: and around the same time it was already being taking
Speaker 5: off from the UK. Initially, it was grown exclusively for
Speaker 5: the royal court, earning its nickname connexumus muse. Connexum muse
Speaker 5: it basically means royal vegetable. And there are two primary
Speaker 5: growing regions in Germany where asparagus is in abundance. One
Speaker 5: of them is Schwitzwingen and it's where Karl Theodore, Prince elector,
Speaker 5: started a green asparagus growing competition among the princes in
Speaker 5: the seventeenth century, and then the other region, Schrobenhausen. It's
Speaker 5: also steeped in asparagus history and houses the European Asparagus Museum.
Speaker 5: That's a thing, an asparagus museum. You know what else
Speaker 5: might have a museum. All of these ads one day
Speaker 5: probably not buy what's in city, dads, and we're back, Okay, James.
Speaker 4: I do think it's.
Speaker 5: Fairly interesting that there's an asparagus museum in Europe. But
Speaker 5: I also think it's interesting that you literally grew up
Speaker 5: in a town that have an asparagus mascot can you
Speaker 5: please explain this to me as someone who does not
Speaker 5: know what that means?
Speaker 4: I can I can explain a little bit of the
Speaker 4: asparagus mascot. So I live in at Evesham when I
Speaker 4: grew up. Evesham of course give its name to the
Speaker 4: veyl Avivsham, which is the area where asparagus. It was
Speaker 4: actually the last British product to get a protected origin
Speaker 4: status from the European Union before Britain terminally fucked its
Speaker 4: economy by leaving the European Union. And so it's this
Speaker 4: area around the velevition. You can't call it relevition asparagus
Speaker 4: unless from Elvisham. I've just learned that the little purple
Speaker 4: tips on the spears, that's not normal. Apparently that's just
Speaker 4: an evel Aviv Sham.
Speaker 5: So that's a place. But I understand it's BRITI that's.
Speaker 4: Why it's in Worcestershire. So not not made up, you
Speaker 4: just uh, just it's Worcestershire. By the way, is how
Speaker 4: you pronounce Workshire. No people fucking But it's one of
Speaker 4: those words like it is.
Speaker 5: I didn't actually think that was what it was called,
Speaker 5: but I would actually maybe mispronounce.
Speaker 7: Probably.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it seems like one of those words that really
Speaker 4: flummocks is the American mind. So yeah, I grew up
Speaker 4: nevel Avievsham and in Develovievshim we grow a lot of
Speaker 4: asparagus and very proud of it. So we have an
Speaker 4: asparagus festival if you want to get really like hokey
Speaker 4: and English, which people in England do be loving to do,
Speaker 4: especially people of a certain ethnicity that like, do you
Speaker 4: generally pick asparagus from Saint George's Day to Midsummer's Day?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 4: Saint George is the patrons of England and Catalonia. So
Speaker 4: if you want to get really sort of parochial about it,
Speaker 4: you can get a little nationalistic on the asparagus. I
Speaker 4: think most people don't. But it started in Evesham. Evesham
Speaker 4: used to have an asparagus festival. We have little mascot
Speaker 4: right dressed as and asparagus as.
Speaker 5: You do, like literally a man in an asparagus outfit,
Speaker 5: like walking around.
Speaker 4: Yeah. So there have been two generations. The first one
Speaker 4: I think we've mentioned the purple tips and that it
Speaker 4: just looks like a dick. He looked a lot like
Speaker 4: a day he looked like a ganger and us penis, I.
Speaker 5: Mean fertility was known for that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this one didn't look fertile. This one look best avoided.
Speaker 4: If I'm honest, I looked like they retired him in
Speaker 4: two thousand and they and we're faced in with gusty
Speaker 4: asparagus man who, if I mines, doesn't look as asparagusy
Speaker 4: because they've given him sort of a flower tip, like.
Speaker 5: A broccoli looking thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it looks a bit like a wheat, kind of weedy,
Speaker 4: kind of mapley. It's not full asparagus. There's also an
Speaker 4: asparagus fairy. I've seen. I've not personally come across the
Speaker 4: asparagus fairy, but I've seen that into fairy. Yeah, you
Speaker 4: want to let me disdrop this in the Yeah, he
Speaker 4: told me about the fucking fairy. It's just a non
Speaker 4: stop learning journey for hery.
Speaker 5: Insane first the stained glass, but I still can throughout
Speaker 5: the thing.
Speaker 4: Wow, yeah y'all what? Yeah, Well, maybe we'll make this
Speaker 4: the the.
Speaker 3: Image for the image.
Speaker 5: This is a great image.
Speaker 4: It's a classic image. Yes, you've got a man dressed
Speaker 4: as King Saint George, not King George.
Speaker 5: Different faces onto that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that would be great it it'll be highly entertaining.
Speaker 4: So yeah, you can, you can go now. I think
Speaker 4: it's in Bredford, yet it is in Breadforton where you
Speaker 4: can have the Asparagus Festival. And what the festival is
Speaker 4: is like the first auction of asparagus, right, and then
Speaker 4: they'll auction that off for a local cause. Normally the
Speaker 4: first you know, the first full bundle of asparagus verus
Speaker 4: round it's called, and that will immediately get brought up
Speaker 4: by someone. People buy hundreds of pounds for it. Wow,
Speaker 4: and then they rush it off to their restaurant in London, right,
Speaker 4: and they make it for their fancy people to pay
Speaker 4: fancy money for this fancy vegetable. Famously, Famously, I perhaps
Speaker 4: overstated that Gus the Asparagus Man was refused entry to
Speaker 4: the Houses of Parliament in the United Kingdom maybe maybe
Speaker 4: ten fifteen years ago now because it's costume primented a
Speaker 4: security risk. Wow.
Speaker 5: Wait okay, as someone who's had asparagus in an asparagus town,
Speaker 5: and also here is there a difference in taste?
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Fresh asparagus is a lot better
Speaker 4: when you get it in American shops. It's very woody like.
Speaker 4: It doesn't have that I would describe raw asparagus where
Speaker 4: it's fresh. You know when you get peas and you've
Speaker 4: grown peas, you're having the peas. Yeah, so it has that. Yeah,
Speaker 4: love a fresh pea. So it's got that kind of
Speaker 4: you can take that however you want. It's got that
Speaker 4: kind of pea freshness and sweetness to it.
Speaker 5: That's really good.
Speaker 4: It is really good, Scharene. That's why we have a
Speaker 4: whole thing about it.
Speaker 5: How good asparagu It's not gonna lie.
Speaker 4: I'm going to grow some.
Speaker 5: I don't seek it out.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we'll go on a world tour. We'll doe there'll
Speaker 4: be a nice combination. Actually, you're going to see chin asparagus.
Speaker 4: So what you're doing with the asparagus, right, you cut
Speaker 4: it and you just get its hand cut right. You're
Speaker 4: not going through like a combine harvester to do this.
Speaker 4: You're going through the little knife, serrated knife sharp on
Speaker 4: the back side. You just cutting the stalks and you
Speaker 4: immediately you level them off right at the base, so
Speaker 4: you sort of so that the point to tips are level,
Speaker 4: and then you just cut across the base. So some
Speaker 4: of them are going to have more of the woody
Speaker 4: white bass than others. The parts the green part has
Speaker 4: been above. The toy on in the white puts below
Speaker 4: right right. So you're doing them. You get you're around
Speaker 4: or you get your have many sparagus, you're getting right.
Speaker 4: You get it very fresh. Often when at least when
Speaker 4: we were buy it, we would just buy it like
Speaker 4: from farm shops or by the side of the road.
Speaker 4: We never grew it because it was just like a
Speaker 4: lot You could get a lot more from just doing
Speaker 4: other vegetables. But you'd buy it the day it was harvested,
Speaker 4: and then you drive it home immediately put it into
Speaker 4: boiling water just briefly, right, and then you pop it
Speaker 4: out and you don't need to cook it for very
Speaker 4: long if it's good, if you don't want to cook
Speaker 4: it for very long rate, just just softening it a
Speaker 4: little bit. And then if you have it with there's
Speaker 4: original way to have it. It's with butter, which kind
Speaker 4: of you know, does away with the cereal cholesterol benefit.
Speaker 4: Nice to dip in a in a soft.
Speaker 5: Boiled and curious. I mean, the health stuff was just
Speaker 5: like a fun ti bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's do
Speaker 5: you know how you want?
Speaker 4: Yeah, have it. However, you want dip it in a
Speaker 4: in a soft boiled egg where you were you boil
Speaker 4: the egg, but the yolk is still run dip the
Speaker 4: asparagusy in Yeah, never even part of that cambo. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's a good one. It's lots of uh what's a
Speaker 4: good childhood memories or asparagus in the egg? Yeah, lots
Speaker 4: of fun ways to eat it. Other things about the
Speaker 4: vale of vives from asparagus. Yeah, he Gussy the asparagus man.
Speaker 4: He visited the I.
Speaker 5: Want to repeat that. He's called Gus. Sorry, Gus the
Speaker 5: asparagus man.
Speaker 4: Sorry, he visited the European Parliament where he read and
Speaker 4: there is uh true. Will I see a video of this? Actually, Sreen,
Speaker 4: I think it would be good for you.
Speaker 5: Oh gosh, So.
Speaker 4: Here's a video of Gusty asparagus man in the European
Speaker 4: Parliament reading a poem. England is crazy one of them
Speaker 4: more like pro oh god, yeah, now you want to
Speaker 4: listen to it as well.
Speaker 5: The Great and Noble Asparagus.
Speaker 4: Sorry, I'm sorry he's doing it again. He's reading a
Speaker 4: poem about asparagus, that's correct.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 4: And then he's making a joke about about cider another
Speaker 4: great more of a Hereford product than another great local product.
Speaker 4: But yeah, yeah, I come from the home home of
Speaker 4: Gussie asparagus man. I've enjoyed many many asparaguy. It's nice
Speaker 4: when we have really miserable like January, February even into
Speaker 4: March in the UK is miserable. Like we get much
Speaker 4: shorter days, right because a bit of being further north,
Speaker 4: it rains a lot, Like we don't get winters like
Speaker 4: American cold places where you get like dry or like
Speaker 4: snowy kind of winters. We just get like right around
Speaker 4: freezing and raining a lot of the time, which is
Speaker 4: the worst weather that is possible to have. And it's
Speaker 4: just fucking miserable. So like when you're having the asparagus,
Speaker 4: it's like a nice sign days. Our summer days are
Speaker 4: really long as well, so you're getting these nice long
Speaker 4: summer days. You're like starting to get like it comes
Speaker 4: after what they call the hungry gap, right that time
Speaker 4: in like February March where you're not getting as many
Speaker 4: of your fresh vegetables sort of the time when you're
Speaker 4: not really harvesting very much, so you've only got like
Speaker 4: your storage stuff, right, your apples and potatoes, and so
Speaker 4: after that you get your asparagus. It's the start of
Speaker 4: your spring vege. So it's a nice little, nice little
Speaker 4: celebration of springtime.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, I didn't know anything about asparagus other
Speaker 5: than it made your pea smell until this episode.
Speaker 4: Son't even make your pea smell. Would say, is that
Speaker 4: the asparagene.
Speaker 5: Well, okay, asparagus is your pea smell because what asparagus
Speaker 5: is digested, asparagustic acid gets broken down into sulfur containing byproducts,
Speaker 5: and sulfur smells like eggs and also apparently can smell
Speaker 5: like pea because sulfur in general is not pleasant to
Speaker 5: the smell. And then when you peet, these byproducts evaporate
Speaker 5: almost immediately, and this is what you this is what
Speaker 5: causes you to smell that very unpleasant scent.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you could tell if someone's find out the asparagus.
Speaker 5: I thought the answer is usually sulfur when it comes
Speaker 5: to food and smells.
Speaker 4: Yeah it is. Yeah, bad eggs too.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I want to end this episode with just a tale
Speaker 5: of a town in the US where it had their
Speaker 5: of king asparagus.
Speaker 4: I want to just wow, Okay, I want to talk
Speaker 4: about this for a moment.
Speaker 5: It was once the biggest US producers of asparagus. Less
Speaker 5: than a century ago, the town of Aiken, South Carolina,
Speaker 5: was known as one of the asparagus capitals of the US.
Speaker 5: From the mid eighteenth through the mid twentieth centuries, cotton
Speaker 5: was the South's predominant crop, and Aichen was no exception
Speaker 5: to this. Just before the Civil War, cotton comprised nearly
Speaker 5: sixty percent of all American exports. The phrase King Cotton
Speaker 5: which was made famous by then Senator and then future
Speaker 5: Governor James Henry Hammond. He implied that the European industry
Speaker 5: depended heavily on Southern cotton. He owned the Redcliffe Plantation
Speaker 5: in Beach Island, Aikin County. Enslaved people obviously provided the
Speaker 5: labor for cotton cultivation, and so him, along with scores
Speaker 5: of other plantation owners. He hoped that buyers of Southern
Speaker 5: cotton would fight against the blockade enacted by Lincoln's federal forces,
Speaker 5: and Southerners, because of this, were certain that their cotton
Speaker 5: exports were so crucial that Europeans would surely back the
Speaker 5: South in the event of a Civil war. Spoiler alert
Speaker 5: that did not happen, and then by eighteen sixty five,
Speaker 5: the outcome of the Civil War had planters looking at
Speaker 5: their commercial ventures in a new way. Farmers broke their
Speaker 5: dependence on cotton, and they desperately tried to find and
Speaker 5: locate another king crop. A variety of crops could thrive
Speaker 5: in the warm, sandy soil of Achen. The first reference
Speaker 5: to asparagus being grown as a commercial crop in South
Speaker 5: Carolina can be found in a nineteen oh three pamphlet
Speaker 5: called Asparagus Its Culture for Home and for Market. According
Speaker 5: to the pamphlet, the crop was first grown commercially in Charleston,
Speaker 5: where farmers produced a specific variety called palmetto. It was
Speaker 5: cultivated especially to flourish in the southern climate, and soon
Speaker 5: this specialized variety spread into a Bacon, Williston, and Bamberg counties.
Speaker 5: By nineteen eighteen, the Clemson University Department of Agricultural Economics
Speaker 5: reported that the state had about eleven hundred acres of
Speaker 5: asparagus under cultivation. Fast forward to nineteen thirty seven, this
Speaker 5: number increased to eighty seven hundred acres. So area residents
Speaker 5: enjoyed their share of fresh asparagus, but most of it
Speaker 5: was sent to New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, d c.
Speaker 5: From the nineteen twenties through the mid nineteen fifties, asparagus
Speaker 5: was gathered daily and shipped by train to its northern destinations.
Speaker 5: Shippers often wrapped the delicate spears and Spanish moss gathered
Speaker 5: from the live oak trees that abounded the city. The
Speaker 5: crop flourished commercially for almost thirty years until production slowed
Speaker 5: down in nineteen fifty three. World War II may have
Speaker 5: lessened the workforce available to farm the crop, or perhaps
Speaker 5: the marketing success from the California competitors was more effective
Speaker 5: than South Carolina's. It is also possible let the varieties
Speaker 5: grow an Achen and the surrounding areas were more susceptible
Speaker 5: to diseases that weakened the crops, and so although several
Speaker 5: farms near Achen still grow asparagus, according to aichinregional dot com,
Speaker 5: the reign of King Asparagus is over.
Speaker 2: It's sad.
Speaker 4: Yeah not here, still king in my heart.
Speaker 5: I just thought that was a funny little tail, but yeah,
Speaker 5: that's asparagus for you. Thank you, James for motivating this knowledge.
Speaker 4: That I now have it's okay. Take that, carry that
Speaker 4: with you for the rest of your life. Use it wisely.
Speaker 5: Thank you, and yeah, that's this episode of it could
Speaker 5: happen here Until next time, I don't.
Speaker 3: Know to sleep.
Speaker 8: Bye, hello, and welcome back to it could happen here.
Speaker 8: I'm your occasional host, Molly Conger, and it's just me today.
Speaker 8: But I've got a weird one for you now. I
Speaker 8: don't know if you remember, but a few months ago
Speaker 8: I did an episode about a ring of Hitler loving
Speaker 8: zoom bombers running a national campaign to disrupt public meetings.
Speaker 8: Those guys were mostly members of the Goyam Defense League,
Speaker 8: an anti Semitic group of freaks who just love getting
Speaker 8: a rise out of people. They were calling themselves the
Speaker 8: City Council Death Squad, and they've disrupted hundreds of virtual
Speaker 8: public meetings from coast to coast over the last year,
Speaker 8: everything from zoning boards in New Jersey to city council
Speaker 8: meetings in California, even dipping their toe into messing with
Speaker 8: online meetings of alcoholics anonymous. They mostly seem motivated by
Speaker 8: their insatiable need to force strangers to hear them say
Speaker 8: the N word. But I do think they understand that
Speaker 8: their behavior limits people's access to local government. Many of
Speaker 8: the cities they targeted responded by ending virtual participation in
Speaker 8: government meetings. That means fewer people participate. It's harder to
Speaker 8: engage with local government, and people just generally feel less
Speaker 8: safe and less motivated to pursue the kinds of redress
Speaker 8: available to them through local democracy. And I'm glad we
Speaker 8: did the episode. I heard from people in maybe a
Speaker 8: dozen cities all over the country who found the episode
Speaker 8: online when they were trying to figure out what the
Speaker 8: hell happened at their own meeting and the guy's doing it.
Speaker 8: Liked the episode so much that now they use my
Speaker 8: name when they call into meetings to scream slurs, which
Speaker 8: is a less positive outcome, But what can you do.
Speaker 8: I assume if the mayor of Redlands, California googles me,
Speaker 8: he'll figure out I wasn't the one doing Holocaust denial
Speaker 8: at his meeting. But overall, this seems like the kind
Speaker 8: of thing that will be prosecute able, especially considering we
Speaker 8: know the real names of many of the group's ringleaders. Well,
Speaker 8: someone has finally been indicted for orchestrating hateful zoom bombing
Speaker 8: and virtual city council meetings. But it isn't them, It's
Speaker 8: something much, much weirder. Last month, FEDS unsealed an indictment
Speaker 8: against a man named Mohammad al Hashemi. He's a Syrian
Speaker 8: national from Albania currently living in England, and according to
Speaker 8: the federal prosecutor, he was the mastermind behind a zoom
Speaker 8: bombing ring that targeted the Fresno City Council in the
Speaker 8: summer of twenty twenty. He's been charged with one count
Speaker 8: of engaging in repeated harassing communication, one count of engaging
Speaker 8: in anonymous telecommunications harassment, three counts of a classic eighteen USC.
Speaker 8: Eight seventy five C transmitting threatening communications, and one count
Speaker 8: of conspiracy for doing all of the above. Right, So
Speaker 8: there's a conspiracy, and then those other charges represent the
Speaker 8: over acts of that conspiracy. Now, again, I'm not a lawyer.
Speaker 8: I'll tell you that every time. I don't know all
Speaker 8: the laws, and so this is the first time I'm
Speaker 8: realizing that harassing someone by phone is a federal crime.
Speaker 8: I mean, it makes sense, right, of course, that's illegal
Speaker 8: at the federal level too. I just didn't think about
Speaker 8: that the last time we were talking about zoom bombing.
Speaker 8: I mean, the obvious charge is interstate threats. If you
Speaker 8: make a threat using a phone, the internet, or the mail,
Speaker 8: that's federal territory. But prosecutors are sometimes a little gun
Speaker 8: shy about threats. They want a slam dunk case. They
Speaker 8: want a true threat, right, something that is undeniably an
Speaker 8: actual threat, before they'll bring a case like that. So
Speaker 8: I thought they'd have to get a little creative if
Speaker 8: they wanted to indict zoom bombers. But if you're just
Speaker 8: talking about harassing phone calls, it's actually pretty straightforward to
Speaker 8: bring a federal case against the guys doing this. So
Speaker 8: two of the charges of the indictment are for different
Speaker 8: subsections of forty seven USC. Two twenty three Obscene or
Speaker 8: harassing phone calls. Subsection A one C is making a
Speaker 8: telephone call or utilizing a telecommunications device, right, So that
Speaker 8: means it doesn't have to be a literal telephone. It
Speaker 8: can be a zoom call. It can be in any
Speaker 8: kind of telecommunications device like text message, et cetera. Whether
Speaker 8: or not conversation or communication ensues, which means you know,
Speaker 8: repeated harassing hang up calls.
Speaker 7: Count two.
Speaker 8: You don't even have to say anything without disclosing his
Speaker 8: identity and with the intent to abuse, threatn or harass
Speaker 8: a specific person, So this subsection is specific to the
Speaker 8: fact that they were using fake names. And then subsection
Speaker 8: A one E is making repeated telephone calls or repeatedly
Speaker 8: initiating communication with the telecommunications device during which conversation or
Speaker 8: communication ensues solely to harass any specific person. Both of
Speaker 8: those counts carry a maximum sentence of two years, and
Speaker 8: they're usually just punished with a fine, not that serious.
Speaker 8: The other counts are a little more serious. Interstate threatening
Speaker 8: communications can get you up to five years per count,
Speaker 8: and some of these calls had some pretty violent language.
Speaker 8: I'm interested to see how they move forward with the threats,
Speaker 8: though the actual intent or ability to carry out a
Speaker 8: threat doesn't necessarily matter if the person the threat was
Speaker 8: made to was in reasonable fear from it, but I'm
Speaker 8: sure we'll see It argued that he was in Albania
Speaker 8: he never planned to go to Fresno to hurt people.
Speaker 8: The obvious counter to that, though, is that he did
Speaker 8: literally say he was in Fresno, and there was no
Speaker 8: obvious indication to the victims that that wasn't true, and
Speaker 8: he's also charged with conspiracy. The indictment refers multiple times
Speaker 8: to unnamed co conspirators, so this isn't just one guy
Speaker 8: making racist, praying phone calls. This is an organized and
Speaker 8: intentional conspiracy to engage in harassment and threats.
Speaker 4: That conspiracy is a little grim.
Speaker 8: The FBI in the UK's Metropolitan Police Force did find
Speaker 8: an interview at least nine members of the group they're
Speaker 8: saying Alhacemi was leading, and the reason they aren't named
Speaker 8: is because they are children. The children interviewed by the
Speaker 8: FBI had pretty consistent accounts. Once there was a federal
Speaker 8: agent in their living room telling their mom about the
Speaker 8: Albanian Nazi they'd been chatting with on roadblocks. Okay, not
Speaker 8: exactly roadblocks, that's a little hyperbolic, but the raids were
Speaker 8: coordinated on a platform called Gilded, which is kind of
Speaker 8: like Discord and is owned by the same company as Roadblocks,
Speaker 8: so it's mostly used by gamers to talk about gaming,
Speaker 8: but also apparently for doing federal crimes. But the kids
Speaker 8: all said the group's leaders were users named Encino. That's
Speaker 8: i ns e E n O, not in Sino like Incino.
Speaker 8: Man the poly Shore movie and Sapper. Many of the
Speaker 8: kids correctly ascertained that Encino, the user FEDS have identified
Speaker 8: as Al Hashemi, was older than they were and European,
Speaker 8: but spoke English very well. I went back and pulled
Speaker 8: the public access TV recordings of some of those meetings
Speaker 8: and listened to the calls attributed to Alhachemi, and he
Speaker 8: really doesn't have an accent that I could hear. You know,
Speaker 8: you don't got a hand it to him or anything.
Speaker 8: But he does say the N word like a red
Speaker 8: blooded American racist, so I guess he had some practice.
Speaker 8: The kid, interviewed by the Metropolitan Police Service at his parents'
Speaker 8: house in London, said that Sapper was a college student
Speaker 8: in the United Arab Emirates, although in the footnotes the
Speaker 8: FBI agent indicates that actually Sapper is in Jordan, but
Speaker 8: you know, close enough for a teenager. I can't find
Speaker 8: any information about whether or not charges are being pursued
Speaker 8: against that user, either in the US or in Jordan.
Speaker 8: He isn't identified by name at all, but he does
Speaker 8: appear to be the only other adult discussed in that document.
Speaker 8: The English teenager said Sapper loves spamming, the calls they
Speaker 8: raid with isis gore videos. The criminal complaint details seven
Speaker 8: incidents of zoom raids in June and July of twenty
Speaker 8: twenty five of which were meetings of the Presno City Council.
Speaker 8: One was a Jewish religious service conducted by Zoom in Albuquerque,
Speaker 8: New Mexico, and the other was some random couple's wedding
Speaker 8: in upstate New York. But the incidents described in detail
Speaker 8: in the complaint are clearly not the only ones that happened,
Speaker 8: just the only ones being charged at this time. When
Speaker 8: FBI agents interviewed a thirteen year old boy in Oregon,
Speaker 8: he told them the group's leader also enjoyed zoom bombing
Speaker 8: parent teacher conferences, specifically at schools that had had past
Speaker 8: active shooter events. The boy said, Encino again, that's al Hachemi,
Speaker 8: according to the complaint, loves to offend people and talks
Speaker 8: about racist things more than anyone else. But you know
Speaker 8: who doesn't love to offend people. The sponsors of this show.
Speaker 4: And we are back.
Speaker 8: I hope you enjoyed those products and services. Hopefully none
Speaker 8: of them were. Four online chat platforms where European neo
Speaker 8: Nazis are recruiting your kids, all right, So all these
Speaker 8: criminal charges here are related to conduct that occurred in
Speaker 8: the span of less than five weeks four full years ago.
Speaker 8: But for as long as it took to actually indict Alhacemi,
Speaker 8: it looks like the FEDS acted pretty quickly. After the
Speaker 8: first few threats were made. They were sitting at the
Speaker 8: dining room table talking to a kid identified as RB
Speaker 8: by August twenty seventh, barely two months after the call started.
Speaker 8: RB is described as a juvenile with a history of
Speaker 8: making threats who lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Obviously, it's
Speaker 8: impossible to identify this minor, and probably not a good
Speaker 8: idea to do even if I could, But I am
Speaker 8: dying to know what exactly that history of threats looks like.
Speaker 8: I found a couple of news stories in the year
Speaker 8: or two before this about teens in the Spartanburg area
Speaker 8: who'd been arrested for making threats. Now, Obviously, again, even
Speaker 8: in those news stories, if a miner is arrested and
Speaker 8: are identified, so there's no way to sort of connect
Speaker 8: these two unnamed teens. But I did find a story
Speaker 8: about a ninth grader who posted a snapchat on the
Speaker 8: day of the Parkland school shooting in twenty eighteen, I
Speaker 8: was a photo of the teenager holding a realistic fake
Speaker 8: gun with the caption round two of Florida tomorrow. Again,
Speaker 8: it's impossible to say if there's any connection, but the
Speaker 8: general age, location, and interest in school shootings definitely caught
Speaker 8: my eye. Another member of the group, identified as a
Speaker 8: miner named CG in North Caldwell, New Jersey, sometimes used
Speaker 8: the name Adam Lanza during the zoom raids, an homage
Speaker 8: to the Sandy Hook school shooter, and when the FBI
Speaker 8: was chatting with RB on August twenty seventh, he told
Speaker 8: him about another user in the discord who posted often
Speaker 8: about his desire to carry out a school shooting and
Speaker 8: wanting to kill a Few days after that, the FBI
Speaker 8: agents were sitting down with that thirteen year old boy
Speaker 8: and his parents in Oregon. That boy, identified as PM,
Speaker 8: told the agents that Encino wasn't just interested in zoom bombing,
Speaker 8: but the group also dosed people, naming a bizarre list
Speaker 8: of targets ranging from Jewish leaders to yoga teachers and
Speaker 8: cooking classes. PM also told the agents that Encino had
Speaker 8: docksed a former member of the group, a girl identified
Speaker 8: in a footnote as LT, after a disagreement over whether
Speaker 8: or not they should be using so many racial slurs
Speaker 8: in the prank phone calls. Now I know, I said
Speaker 8: it wasn't possible or even advisable to try to identify
Speaker 8: these miners, but it turns out it is possible, and
Speaker 8: she's not a miner anymore.
Speaker 7: I don't know.
Speaker 8: Maybe the rule is if you're old enough to drive drunk,
Speaker 8: you're old enough to get talked about on a podcast.
Speaker 8: She's got a court date coming up for a DUI
Speaker 8: arrest in April. The girl identified as LT was docked
Speaker 8: by the group's leader in July twenty twenty, when she
Speaker 8: was just sixteen, and we only have that thirteen year
Speaker 8: old as firing school shooter's word for it as to
Speaker 8: why she left the group. Maybe it is possible that
Speaker 8: she disagreed with the racial slur heavy call scripts, but
Speaker 8: I don't think that's because she's not a huge fan
Speaker 8: of racism. She shows up that same year in leaked
Speaker 8: discord chats from the servers Groper Haven and Nick Fuentes Unofficial,
Speaker 8: both servers for fans of Nick Quente's She identifies herself
Speaker 8: as a paleo conservative, Christian monarchist and claims to know
Speaker 8: Nick Quentez. Then another user asked her if she likes Nick.
Speaker 2: She says, yeah, he's cool, but she takes issue with
Speaker 2: the fact.
Speaker 8: That he wants to marry a white woman because he is,
Speaker 8: in her eyes, not white, and says whites are better
Speaker 8: than any other race and we need to stay inside
Speaker 8: of our own race. A few sort of vestigial stitches
Speaker 8: of videos with her now banned TikTok account show her
Speaker 8: in a Trump shirt and Maga hat giving the camera
Speaker 8: this weird Kubrick stare as. The text girls that think
Speaker 8: communists should be jailed appears over her head. You know,
Speaker 8: kids will be kids, right, Just classic kids stuff, wanting
Speaker 8: to imprison your political enemies and being really opposed to
Speaker 8: race mixing.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 8: Last summer, she gave a speech about canceled culture to
Speaker 8: the Burkes County Patriots, an anti government extremist group that
Speaker 8: sent charter buses to the insurrection, and public records show
Speaker 8: she received a stipend as a legislative intern at the
Speaker 8: Pennsylvania House of Representatives. The teenage Groper to legislative Aid
Speaker 8: pipeline is something that should concern us all a little
Speaker 8: bit more. But doxing LT seems to have frightened some
Speaker 8: of the other kids. PM that's thirteen year old in
Speaker 8: Oregon told agents he was worried the group would dox
Speaker 8: him if he tried to leave BO. A minor in
Speaker 8: North Carolina told agents he believed in Sino had access
Speaker 8: to his computer by a spyware. AM, a seventeen year
Speaker 8: old in Maryland, provided agents with screenshots showing in Sino
Speaker 8: had posted his address and discussed having him swatted. And
Speaker 8: this is such a messy, ugly thing, right, So first
Speaker 8: of all, the are kids. They're kids, right, One of
Speaker 8: them is as young as thirteen, and that has to
Speaker 8: be front of mind in all of this. But even
Speaker 8: if they lack the frontal lobe capacity to really understand
Speaker 8: the consequences of saying you're going to kill someone, this
Speaker 8: isn't just normal kid acting out behavior, right. PM told
Speaker 8: other users he wanted to shoot up his school. AM
Speaker 8: posted often about wanting to build bombs and blow things
Speaker 8: up and expressed a lot of interest in isis. They
Speaker 8: were all calling into these meetings and saying the most shocking,
Speaker 8: upsetting things they could think of, and it's not one
Speaker 8: hundred percent clear why right, Like they didn't all necessarily
Speaker 8: have the same motivations or understandings. A teenager identified as
Speaker 8: kh told agents the goal is to create such a
Speaker 8: disturbance that the hosts have no choice but determinate the meeting.
Speaker 8: Hurting people's feelings along the way is completely in bounds,
Speaker 8: and the slurs were just a means to that end.
Speaker 8: He said they would quote just have fun in there.
Speaker 8: Am told agents he was just posting quote random things,
Speaker 8: but he also admitted he hates Jews, and so maybe
Speaker 8: it's a meaningless exercise to try to nail down exactly
Speaker 8: how ideologically committed these teens were to this project of
Speaker 8: racial and religious harassment. But Ala Sheemi is also not
Speaker 8: the first Nazi to see the value in recruiting teens online.
Speaker 8: They may just be kids talking shit right now, but
Speaker 8: if you hear a kid talking this type of shit,
Speaker 8: don't brush it off right This starts somewhere, This edgy, shocking,
Speaker 8: un serious sort of four chan style racism crystallizes into
Speaker 8: serious ideological commitment for some of them. And I hope
Speaker 8: these kids' parents were able to provide some meaningful intervention
Speaker 8: after they found out what their kids were up to online.
Speaker 8: And back to that timeline, right, So the indictment only
Speaker 8: lists the June twenty twenty calls as the overt acts
Speaker 8: of the conspiracy, but the date range for the charge
Speaker 8: conduct is actually May twenty twenty to February twenty twenty two,
Speaker 8: and maybe that means they plan to introduce additional evidence
Speaker 8: of other calls to support the conspiracy claim. It's hard
Speaker 8: to say. They're being pretty tight lipped about it. Reporting
Speaker 8: by Jason Koebler for four or four Media says the
Speaker 8: Department of Justice declined to comment on the possibility of
Speaker 8: anyone else being charged, and the criminal complaint goes into
Speaker 8: some detail by interviewing multiple cooperative miners, But it is
Speaker 8: possible the records they got back from these various platforms
Speaker 8: led them to other co conspirators who are old enough
Speaker 8: to catch a federal charge. There are a lot of
Speaker 8: details missing here that we'll just have to wait for.
Speaker 8: The docket shows that Alihemi has retained an attorney. I
Speaker 8: assume they wouldn't have unsealed the indictment if they didn't
Speaker 8: have him in custody, but there's no information available at
Speaker 8: when or where he was arrested, and how that extradition
Speaker 8: is coming along. And it's interesting to me how incredibly
Speaker 8: similar the mo is in this case to the ring
Speaker 8: led by the Gham Defense League.
Speaker 3: Guys.
Speaker 8: I mean, it's not exactly a complicated plan. It's not
Speaker 8: hard to believe that racists who never met each other
Speaker 8: would end deependently arrive at the same gross way of
Speaker 8: bothering people. But take for example, one of the incidents
Speaker 8: in the indictment. The man that they alleged was Alhahemi
Speaker 8: called into the Fresno City Council meeting on June eleventh,
Speaker 8: twenty twenty. During public comment. He pretended to be a
Speaker 8: local resident named Brian, and he started off pretty normal, saying,
Speaker 8: you know, I agree with the previous speaker. He's sort
Speaker 8: of indicating that he's interested in and engaged in the
Speaker 8: topic of the meeting. He expresses an opinion about the
Speaker 8: topic at hand, which happened to be police funding, and
Speaker 8: then suddenly he pivots to a violent call for murder
Speaker 8: of black residence and repeatedly uses the N word. And
Speaker 8: so after that call ends, the council's on high alert
Speaker 8: for disruptive callers, so subsequent members of the group don't
Speaker 8: bother with a script or a backstory. They just start
Speaker 8: shouting slurs the second they connect until they're booted from
Speaker 8: the call.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 8: So in this case, the caller after fake Brian was
Speaker 8: that miner from South Carolina, And when his call connects,
Speaker 8: you can hear him laughing, and he just says the
Speaker 8: N word and they hang up on him. I don't know,
Speaker 8: maybe I'm two hung up on the structural similarities here.
Speaker 8: I guess that's just classic crank call procedure, right. You
Speaker 8: start off with the reasonable ruse, You get the person
Speaker 8: you've called to believe this is a real normal phone call,
Speaker 8: and then you shock and upset them by making a
Speaker 8: hard right turn into the I guess you can't really
Speaker 8: call it a punchline if it's not funny, but you
Speaker 8: know what I mean. But if you took the names
Speaker 8: out of this indictment, you could mistake these descriptions of
Speaker 8: calls for city Council death squad scripts. But they didn't
Speaker 8: start doing their zoom bombing until the summer of twenty
Speaker 8: twenty three, and according to this indictment, the FBI agents
Speaker 8: were having uncomfortable conversations with teenage boys all the way
Speaker 8: back in twenty twenty. So I think if there was
Speaker 8: any overlap between these two zoom bomb rings, we'd know
Speaker 8: by now. I think this is just unrelated racists reaching
Speaker 8: the same horrible conclusion. But if those guys are listening,
Speaker 8: I hope they hear the significance of that timeline. Within
Speaker 8: weeks of that first zoom bomb. In this indictment, they
Speaker 8: had search warrants for the homes of two of the
Speaker 8: miners on those calls. I think a lot of people
Speaker 8: assume that if they don't get caught, they aren't going
Speaker 8: to get caught. You see that a lot on tax
Speaker 8: evasion cases. Right after you do it a few years
Speaker 8: in a row, you figure they're never going to get you,
Speaker 8: so you keep doing it. You get a little bolder,
Speaker 8: But they're just taking their time and building their case.
Speaker 8: Just because you haven't been caught yet, does it mean
Speaker 8: they don't know you're doing it?
Speaker 4: So who knows.
Speaker 8: Maybe we'll see a similar indictment against the GDL guys
Speaker 8: a few years after they started doing it. There's not
Speaker 8: really a button to put on this one. We'll have
Speaker 8: to wait for more filings than Al Hashemi's case to
Speaker 8: learn anything more there, But if you know any teenagers,
Speaker 8: check in with them, make sure they're actually playing roeblocks
Speaker 8: and not being coaxed into doing federal crime by a
Speaker 8: Nazi in Albania. You know what better yet, go outside,
Speaker 8: unplug your router, be free.
Speaker 2: First, no matter what happens, to breathe. It's always good
Speaker 2: advice to breathe, But taking good advice is easier said
Speaker 2: than done. Sometimes the world is so overwhelming that any
Speaker 2: added weight, even the weight of oxygen in your lungs,
Speaker 2: feels like it might be enough to drag you down.
Speaker 2: This is one of those times. The last week has
Speaker 2: brought about ten years worth of news, and we are
Speaker 2: all processing the seemingly inevitable coronation of a dictator and
Speaker 2: the sudden hope and possibility inspired by Joe Biden's stepping
Speaker 2: down from the nomination Welcome to It could happen here.
Speaker 2: I'm Robert Evans, and this is a podcast about things
Speaker 2: falling apart and sometimes about how to put them back together.
Speaker 2: The last time I sat down to talk with all
Speaker 2: of you like this was in the immediate aftermath of
Speaker 2: the Trump assassination attempt just before the Republican National Convention.
Speaker 2: I told you not to panic. That's still good advice.
Speaker 2: I also told you that no matter how bad or
Speaker 2: good things may look, literally anything can happen in US politics,
Speaker 2: and by god, it has. I felt it was necessary
Speaker 2: to deliver that message because I saw an awful lot
Speaker 2: of people declaring We're doomed. Fascism is inevitable, and quite frankly,
Speaker 2: I think shit like that only helps the fascists. Well,
Speaker 2: it turned out I was right. A lot has happened
Speaker 2: over the last two weeks, and the situation now is
Speaker 2: very different than it was the day the former president
Speaker 2: took that grazing blow from a sniper's bullet. As is
Speaker 2: usually the case and instances like this, I've had a
Speaker 2: lot of people reach out to me since that episode,
Speaker 2: saying versions of how did you know? And as good
Speaker 2: as it might be for my career to lean into
Speaker 2: that side of my reputation, the truth is that I
Speaker 2: am white knuckling it through every twist and turn like
Speaker 2: everyone else. I spent the RNC wondering if I'd been
Speaker 2: foolish telling people not to panic, and yes, I feel
Speaker 2: a hell of a lot better right now. Of course,
Speaker 2: I don't know what comes next. I just know that
Speaker 2: we're done with the portion of this mess where we
Speaker 2: spiral in a hopeless mire That was last week. This week,
Speaker 2: the outlook is a lot better. And not because Kamala
Speaker 2: Harris is our savior or because Nancy Pelosi is a
Speaker 2: three D chess master, but because men age and die.
Speaker 2: This is a fact I tried to remind myself of
Speaker 2: as I'd grown through that disastrous debate with the rest
Speaker 2: of the country. On one hand, I felt like we
Speaker 2: were all about to watch one ailing, power hungry man
Speaker 2: hand the keys to the kingdom over to a cadre
Speaker 2: of bloodthirsty fascists. But on the other hand, there's always
Speaker 2: something inherently optimistic in this simple reality. The people who
Speaker 2: would be our rulers will all die someday, and so
Speaker 2: long as men die, liberty will never perish. So long
Speaker 2: as men die, we have hope. I stole that line
Speaker 2: from Charlie Chaplin. He put it in the mouth of
Speaker 2: his character from The Great Dictator, a movie he produced
Speaker 2: at great personal cost in nineteen forty riot. As Hitler
Speaker 2: and the Nazis reached the apex of their power. A
Speaker 2: rational analyst staring out at the playing field after the
Speaker 2: fall of France, could be forgiven for having seen the
Speaker 2: outcome as certain Great Britain stood alone, Hitler's armies victorious
Speaker 2: on every theater, and the future of democracy and human
Speaker 2: liberty gasping for breath. One such rational analyst was Joseph Kennedy,
Speaker 2: US ambassador to Great Britain and patriarch of the Kennedy family.
Speaker 2: Joseph was a man of wealth and power, whose sober
Speaker 2: judgment and cunning had seen him short the entire US
Speaker 2: stock market, and the kind of fortune that let him
Speaker 2: buy his way into the ranks of global royalty. He
Speaker 2: was a man who had predicted the future once one big,
Speaker 2: and he let that convince him that he had the
Speaker 2: second sight. And so in November nineteen forty, less than
Speaker 2: a month after the release of the Great Dictator, Kennedy
Speaker 2: found himself in an interview with the Boston Globe, looking
Speaker 2: out at the ruin of Europe and the bombs falling
Speaker 2: on London. He told a reporter, democracy is finished in England.
Speaker 2: It may be here here, of course, being the United States. Now.
Speaker 2: The resulting blowback to all of this saw Kennedy force
Speaker 2: to resign his ambassadorship. The very next year, Hitler invaded
Speaker 2: the the Soviet Union, and for several brutal months it
Speaker 2: looked like Joe had been right. Not only might democracy
Speaker 2: be finished, but every system besides fascism might be hurtling
Speaker 2: towards annihilation and bondage under the Swastika, depending on how
Speaker 2: you count it. The Third Reich and fascism as a whole,
Speaker 2: reached its greatest extent of territorial power in either mid
Speaker 2: August or September nineteen forty one. By November of nineteen
Speaker 2: forty one, a year after Joe Kennedy's remarks to the Globe,
Speaker 2: Operation Barbarossa had been wrenched to a bloody halt, and
Speaker 2: the long battle to push the fascists back and drown
Speaker 2: them in the waters of their birth had begun. And
Speaker 2: so in the end it was Charlie Chaplin, not Joe Kennedy,
Speaker 2: who had the proper measure of things. Liberty survived because
Speaker 2: men died, many millions of them, from Kiev to Canterbury.
Speaker 2: We live in very different times now. The armies of
Speaker 2: fascism are not primarily conquering land under arms. The primary
Speaker 2: terrain of our present conflict exists within the hearts and
Speaker 2: souls of men and women. And while populism is still
Speaker 2: a favorite mechanism of action among the fascists, they have
Speaker 2: in this country at least given up on victory by
Speaker 2: sheer weight of numbers. It's true what they say, war
Speaker 2: never changes. Weapons do, But the core of all human
Speaker 2: conflict revolves around the capture and denial of territory. If
Speaker 2: you can't occupy ground yourself, you must at least deny
Speaker 2: it to the enemy. In infantry combat, this is the
Speaker 2: primary use of a machine gun, not to kill people,
Speaker 2: but to blanket an area in bullets and stop the
Speaker 2: enemy from moving through it. In our modern war of
Speaker 2: thoughts and feelings, the machine gun has yielded to the
Speaker 2: fire hose of propaganda and disinformation. These have always been
Speaker 2: parts of the fascist arsenal, but the Internet has allowed
Speaker 2: an increase in the scale and speed of their deployment
Speaker 2: that is very much comparable to the replacement of bolt
Speaker 2: action rifles with automatic ones. The forces of basic human
Speaker 2: decency have a natural advantage in terms of human terrain
Speaker 2: that should be impossible for the fascists to counter, no
Speaker 2: matter what the bastards say, most people want to be
Speaker 2: left alone with the people they love to live their lives.
Speaker 2: The forces of hate, the people who want to throw
Speaker 2: trans kids in their parents in gas chambers and drown
Speaker 2: migrants in the Rio Grande tap out at a little
Speaker 2: over a third of the population max. If you want
Speaker 2: to return to World War II metaphors, and why wouldn't you?
Speaker 2: The monsters are stuck in tiny, landlocked Germany without any
Speaker 2: gas or steel. The only way for them to access
Speaker 2: the resources in territory they need to maneuver themselves into
Speaker 2: a victory is by cutting us off from each other
Speaker 2: and keeping us too confused and divided to surround the
Speaker 2: bastards and smother them all for good. They do this
Speaker 2: by convincing you that you are isolated, alone and surrounded
Speaker 2: by them. Our hopelessness is their force multiplier. When leftists
Speaker 2: in the US look out at Ukrainians struggling for survival
Speaker 2: and write them off as Nazis, as diluted tools of imperialism,
Speaker 2: When liberals in blue cities to cry college students protesting
Speaker 2: on behalf of dying Palestinian children as agents of Hamas,
Speaker 2: the lines of solidarity between a snap rather than wrapping
Speaker 2: like a garret around the throats of our opponents. This
Speaker 2: is why you've seen so much allegiance and sympathy between
Speaker 2: the cruelest and most deluded segments of the Western left.
Speaker 2: The people who laughed at Syrian civilians sheltering from Bushah
Speaker 2: al Assad's bombs and called them the CIA and the
Speaker 2: agents of Putin's Russia and Peter Teal's neo monarchist right.
Speaker 2: The Teals, Bannons, Putin's Airdoins, Trumps and Modis of the
Speaker 2: world know how lonely they are. The only way they
Speaker 2: can win is to convince you that you're alone. Then
Speaker 2: they have you at a disadvantage. Then they can kill
Speaker 2: us one by one. You know, there's no smooth way
Speaker 2: to transition to an ad and a piece like this,
Speaker 2: But here it is. We're back now. I'm not a
Speaker 2: young man, but I do sometimes the think of humanity
Speaker 2: as a single, vast, gestalt organism groping for survival and
Speaker 2: comfort in a world that mostly exists beyond what we
Speaker 2: can see. Majority of people are happy existing as part
Speaker 2: of that vast whole. We take comfort and safety in
Speaker 2: our communion with the rest of the species. But there
Speaker 2: are a few diseased minds out there that don't believe
Speaker 2: in the rest of us. These sollipsists see themselves as
Speaker 2: the only minds, and the perpetuation of their own power
Speaker 2: and will as the only real good. That's why men
Speaker 2: like Peter Teel seek physical immortality, and it's why men
Speaker 2: like Vladimir Putin or Hitler seek the kind of immortality
Speaker 2: that comes from welding the edifice of a nation state
Speaker 2: to themselves. Hitler is Germany, and Germany will last forever.
Speaker 2: Elon Musk sees his children as an extension of himself,
Speaker 2: and his fantasies of space colonization are really just a
Speaker 2: fantasy that he will remain central to humanity's future down
Speaker 2: through eternity. Musk has repeatedly identified himself as a pro natalist,
Speaker 2: and he believes his responsibilities to have as many children
Speaker 2: as possible to secure a pro human future. The term
Speaker 2: pro human might confuse you, given the lack of concern
Speaker 2: he has for the children being bombed in Gaza or
Speaker 2: who will surely die in the mass deportation camps through
Speaker 2: a publican party is currently salivating to open. But the
Speaker 2: only real human Elon sees is himself, which is why
Speaker 2: he equates the survival of the species with his own
Speaker 2: ability to breed. As I type, this video has begun
Speaker 2: circulating around the Internet from an interview Musk conducted with
Speaker 2: Jordan Peterson for The Daily Wire. In it, Musk explains
Speaker 2: why he has now fully embraced politics, endorsing Donald Trump
Speaker 2: and declaring himself at war with wokeism, which he describes
Speaker 2: as an existential threat to the species. He claims that
Speaker 2: what cinched this for him was his daughter deciding to transition.
Speaker 6: It happened to one of my older boys where I
Speaker 6: was essentially tricked into signing documents for one of my
Speaker 6: older boys.
Speaker 2: There was a lot of confusion, and.
Speaker 6: You know, I was told, oh, you know, might commit
Speaker 6: suicide if it's incredibly evil, And I agree with you
Speaker 6: that people that have been promoting this should go to president.
Speaker 6: So I was, I was straight into doing this. You know,
Speaker 6: it wasn't explained to me that puberty blocks are actually
Speaker 6: just sterilization drugs.
Speaker 2: So I lost my son essentially.
Speaker 6: So you know they they quote dead naming for a reason. Yeah, right,
Speaker 6: So the reason it's quote dead naming is because so
Speaker 6: my son is dead, killed by the Wok mind virus.
Speaker 2: Musk's child is not in fact dead, but they have
Speaker 2: expressed an identity utterly separate from Elon, an identity he
Speaker 2: cannot understand. Because Musk can only see his children as
Speaker 2: an extension of himself and his ego. This is in
Speaker 2: fact worse than death. It is a threat to Musk's
Speaker 2: own life. This, incidentally, is why Musk and his fellow
Speaker 2: travelers see transgender kids as such a threat. Accepting a
Speaker 2: trans child, even if you don't fully understand how and
Speaker 2: why they feel the way they do, is one of
Speaker 2: the most radical acts of love imaginable. To do this
Speaker 2: means that you've accepted, on a fundamental level that your
Speaker 2: children are autonomous beings, not an extension of you, but
Speaker 2: something new, wonderful, and unique. The essence of parental love
Speaker 2: is to give your children to the world. This means
Speaker 2: accepting that you are finite that the world goes on
Speaker 2: without you. If you see all humanity as an extension
Speaker 2: of your own ego, nothing could be more frightening. The
Speaker 2: people who feel this way, people like Elon, are mutations,
Speaker 2: a glitch in the human system that starts as a
Speaker 2: glitch within the heart of an individual. It comes as
Speaker 2: a byproduct of success in the very visible, spectacular ways
Speaker 2: that feed narcissism. When I think about stuff like this,
Speaker 2: I refer often back to a great art by the
Speaker 2: anthropologist Richard Lee, eating Christmas in the Kalahari. Lee spent
Speaker 2: years living among the Ikung Bushmen, a Bantu speaking hunter
Speaker 2: gatherer group who were seen by anthropologists as some of
Speaker 2: the people still living in a manner most similar to
Speaker 2: our ancient ancestors. One Christmas, as a show of gratitude
Speaker 2: to his hosts, Lee purchased a massive ox for the
Speaker 2: holiday feast. He was excited to show this great gift
Speaker 2: off to his new friends, and he was proud of
Speaker 2: himself for having gotten it, and he was utterly shocked
Speaker 2: when they responded to his pride with mockery of him
Speaker 2: and his ox, insulting it as scrawny, tiny, hardly fit
Speaker 2: to eat now. This shockedly because the ox he had
Speaker 2: purchased was of course quite large, and it was eventually
Speaker 2: explained to him that his friends were reacting with mockery
Speaker 2: not to his gift, but to the evident pride he
Speaker 2: had shown in it, bringing in a great beast worth
Speaker 2: of meat. Either as a hunter, or from buying it
Speaker 2: as Burton did, is the kind of thing that can
Speaker 2: go to a young man's head. If you are the
Speaker 2: one with the poet book or the one who fires
Speaker 2: the arrow, you can forget that the meat before you,
Speaker 2: the meat that you've brought into the community, is not
Speaker 2: the product purely of your own genius, but is a
Speaker 2: product of all of the time and resources invested in
Speaker 2: you by the community. The shaming of the meat, as
Speaker 2: this tactic was called, is a time honored way of
Speaker 2: correcting the glitch in young men of the Ukun before
Speaker 2: it can turn terminal. As one elder in the tribe
Speaker 2: eventually explained to Lee, when a young man kills much meat,
Speaker 2: he comes to think of himself as a chief or
Speaker 2: a big man, and he thinks of the rest of
Speaker 2: us as his servants or inferiors. We can't accept this.
Speaker 2: We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will
Speaker 2: make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his
Speaker 2: meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and
Speaker 2: make him gentle. And speaking of cooling your heart, why
Speaker 2: don't you cool your heart with some ads? And then
Speaker 2: we'll come back to conclude this in a little bit,
Speaker 2: We're back. It has been theorized that the shaming of
Speaker 2: the meat is a social construct that may help to
Speaker 2: explain one of the evolutionary values of satire, perhaps even
Speaker 2: why humanity keeps producing comedians. They act as a part
Speaker 2: of our species immune system. When this glitch in the
Speaker 2: hearts of young men isn't punctured, when it's allowed to
Speaker 2: take off and dominate them, then it changes them on
Speaker 2: a fundamental level, and the being that it leaves in
Speaker 2: its wake seems to understand instinctively that laughter is a
Speaker 2: danger to it. This ultimately explains why Musk purchase Twitter
Speaker 2: and why Barack Obama's mockery of Donald Trump during that
Speaker 2: White House Correspondence Center set us all down the dark
Speaker 2: path that we currently are walking. So clearly, humor alone
Speaker 2: doesn't always save us from these kinds of people either.
Speaker 2: What Will I Have several times and my various shows
Speaker 2: identified myself as an anarchist, and I tend to do
Speaker 2: that even though I don't feel fully comfortable with the title,
Speaker 2: because brevity matters. I'm speaking to a mass audience and
Speaker 2: using that word gets as close enough for the sake
Speaker 2: of a podcast. But I'm not an anarchist in the
Speaker 2: sense that I have some sort of clear vision for
Speaker 2: how to build a utopia. Obviously, I do think anarchism
Speaker 2: has some answers for how human beings might build a
Speaker 2: better world. That's why I went through a Java, It's
Speaker 2: why we cover a lot of the things that we
Speaker 2: cover on these series. But I am primarily an anarchist
Speaker 2: because I understand that hierarchy kills. Because I understand that
Speaker 2: hierarchy separates us from each other and acts as a
Speaker 2: petri dish within which this glitch can propagate. I'm an
Speaker 2: anarchist because I love the people around me, because I
Speaker 2: understand that I am human, and because I see that
Speaker 2: my role in the human immune system is to remind
Speaker 2: other people of that fact and to point a finger
Speaker 2: at the people who have forgotten that they're human. I
Speaker 2: promised in the title of this little piece that I
Speaker 2: would tell you how we can win, and I can
Speaker 2: do that in a few words. We have to remember
Speaker 2: that we are humans. Amala Harris is an authoritarian. The
Speaker 2: fact that she wants to be president at all should
Speaker 2: make you leery of her. But she's not a Trump
Speaker 2: or a Musk. She has not separated herself entirely from humanity,
Speaker 2: if you'll forgive the reference. She understands that she exists
Speaker 2: in the context of all that came before her. Joe
Speaker 2: Biden has been hungry for power all his life. The
Speaker 2: glitch is in him. It has consumed most of him,
Speaker 2: but as we all learned recently, not all of him.
Speaker 2: He too understands that he is a part of humanity,
Speaker 2: indivisible from it. Now you can and should still view
Speaker 2: the man with disgust, even hatred. He ought to be
Speaker 2: in the Hague, but he also stepped down and gave
Speaker 2: up the thing that a week ago I'd have said
Speaker 2: probably mattered most to him in the world. This was
Speaker 2: not a purely selfless gesture. I'm sure he acted in
Speaker 2: a large part to try and salvage his own legacy.
Speaker 2: But it is also not a thing thing Donald Trump
Speaker 2: could ever do. You certainly wouldn't see a man like
Speaker 2: Vladimir Putin make a similar choice, and we've all seen
Speaker 2: the kind of slaughter bb net Yahoo is willing to
Speaker 2: back to hold on to power. None of this redeems
Speaker 2: Biden or makes him a good person or any less
Speaker 2: complicit in genocide than he was a week ago. I
Speaker 2: think it does put us in a better position when
Speaker 2: it comes to fighting for a ceasefire in Gaza. Everyone
Speaker 2: in US politics knows that Biden's political end started with
Speaker 2: the surge of uncommitted voters in Michigan. The loss of
Speaker 2: a second term is not a sufficient punishment for Biden's actions,
Speaker 2: but it is a punishment that has the ability to
Speaker 2: reshape the kind of risks US presidents will and won't
Speaker 2: take for Israel from now on. It has also helped
Speaker 2: me make sense of something that happened in twenty twenty.
Speaker 2: You all remember the moment during the one presidential debate
Speaker 2: that year, President Trump attacked Biden over the numerous scandals
Speaker 2: of his son, Hunter, a troubled drug addict who tried
Speaker 2: and largely failed to use his father's named secure wealth
Speaker 2: and standing for himself. Hunter's troubles have been tremendously embarrassing
Speaker 2: to his father, but up in front of the country
Speaker 2: and world, Biden refused to throw his son under the bus.
Speaker 2: He embraced him and expressed the kind of unconditional love
Speaker 2: that is utterly alien to men like Trump and Musk. Biden,
Speaker 2: for all the evil that he has done in the
Speaker 2: raw selfishness that allowed him to reach the presidency in
Speaker 2: the first place. Is a man who loves his son.
Speaker 2: Most importantly, he loves Hunter as Hunter and not purely
Speaker 2: as an extension of Joe Biden. There's an excellent series
Speaker 2: of articles out in The Atlantic right now by Tim Alberta,
Speaker 2: who might be the finest political journalist writing today. Tim
Speaker 2: had the good instincts to look behind the scenes at
Speaker 2: the team Trump picked to orchestrate his twenty twenty four campaign,
Speaker 2: and he's delivered deep reporting about why they've made some
Speaker 2: of the baffling decisions that they've made. Chief among bafflements
Speaker 2: was the selection of j. D. Vance as Vice President.
Speaker 2: Vance barely won his seat in Congress with the help
Speaker 2: of tens of millions of teal dollars. He is a
Speaker 2: liar without principle who has repeatedly expressed his desire to
Speaker 2: tear up the Constitution and usher in a new red
Speaker 2: caesar to bring this nation to heal under men like him.
Speaker 2: I watched Vance's speech at the RNC live at a
Speaker 2: Heritage Foundation party, surrounded by the rightest of the right,
Speaker 2: not one of them offered a single word of praise.
Speaker 1: Vance.
Speaker 2: Was that bad JD is the sort of pick Trump's
Speaker 2: handlers were sure that they could afford to make. Vance
Speaker 2: would bring the Silicon Valley billionaire set to the table,
Speaker 2: open up their purse strings, convince them they were welcome
Speaker 2: in the new ruling class. Sure he wouldn't bring any votes,
Speaker 2: But a week ago, running against Sleepy Joe, the sick
Speaker 2: man of US politics, Trump's team felt they had votes
Speaker 2: to spare. Well. Now the worm has turned. The Poles
Speaker 2: still point to an election that is deeply in doubt.
Speaker 2: But Poles don't say everything. The panic of their responses
Speaker 2: to Biden's stepping down, the chaotic spree of hate, to
Speaker 2: a single truth. They don't know what to do.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: The monsters are off balance, stumbling, unable to find the ground.
Speaker 2: We can see some evidence of this and the fact
Speaker 2: that Musk just came out and canceled has promised forty
Speaker 2: five million dollar monthly donations to the Trump campaign. This
Speaker 2: is the first chain of solidarity between our enemies to crumble,
Speaker 2: and it won't be the last. Every time that happens,
Speaker 2: we get more room to move and maneuver. The fascists
Speaker 2: may well regain their footing and time to crush us
Speaker 2: But something else has happened in the last few days
Speaker 2: as well. People, we humans, as a vast, blurry mob,
Speaker 2: have started to remember how many of us there are,
Speaker 2: and how much potential the weight of our numbers gives us.
Speaker 2: We have started to reconnect with each other, and that
Speaker 2: has also opened up possibilities that did not exist before.
Speaker 2: Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party aren't going to bring
Speaker 2: an end to global capitalism or drive a stake into
Speaker 2: the heart of the oil and gas industry. There remains
Speaker 2: so much else to do, so many other fights ahead
Speaker 2: of us. But if we can crush the Republicplicans here,
Speaker 2: it will be the fourth election cycle in a row
Speaker 2: where the right made a war on trans people, on
Speaker 2: the concept of diversity, on any kind of open, secular
Speaker 2: society the core of their electoral efforts, and it will
Speaker 2: be the fourth time that they have done that and lost.
Speaker 2: If we break their lines and send them fleeing into
Speaker 2: the hills, we have an opportunity to shatter their power
Speaker 2: and use the momentum of that victory to start building
Speaker 2: something better. There's no cleaner, easy route to a better future,
Speaker 2: but our chances are a hell of a lot better.
Speaker 2: The more of us that stay alive, and the more
Speaker 2: scattered and frightened that we can make our enemies. Our
Speaker 2: strength has always come from solidarity, from the understanding that
Speaker 2: we need each other and that we are part of
Speaker 2: each other. The Putins and Trumps and Musks and Teals
Speaker 2: of the world are of course a part of humanity
Speaker 2: as well, but they are incapable of seeing or accepting that.
Speaker 2: And so long as that is the case, we outnumber them.
Speaker 2: So long as that is the case, we can win.
Speaker 7: It could happen here. It's it could happen here at
Speaker 7: the podcasts that is about. I don't know how everyone
Speaker 7: hates trans people and how this has become a sort
Speaker 7: of cross partisan thing. I'm your host, Bio Wong. We
Speaker 7: are we have been doing. Oh god, I don't even
Speaker 7: know what sort of number of RNC episodes are going
Speaker 7: to have come out before this thing before you hear
Speaker 7: this episode. But we are once again turning away from
Speaker 7: their republic, from the sort of chaos and despair of
Speaker 7: the Republican Party to turn towards the chaos and despair
Speaker 7: of the Democratic Party. Yeah, we're gonna specifically be talking
Speaker 7: about a series of what I think we're kind of
Speaker 7: high profile fights in trans circles over sort of the
Speaker 7: administration very publicly starting to write off trans kids. I
Speaker 7: don't think it got that much news attention because, as
Speaker 7: you may have noticed, it is, Yeah, a lot of
Speaker 7: this is by very specifically Biden administration stuff. We are
Speaker 7: recording the Sunday Warning the morning of the twenty first.
Speaker 7: There is a real chance that by the end of
Speaker 7: the day Biden is no longer the nominee. So we'll
Speaker 7: get into that a little bit, but as of right now,
Speaker 7: he's still the guy, and he is fucking us. So, yeah,
Speaker 7: with you to talk about this is Karin Green, who
Speaker 7: we have had on the show before. Is a trans
Speaker 7: policy expert of many organizations and much experience, and yeah,
Speaker 7: welcome back on this. Welcome back to the show.
Speaker 1: Hey, thanks to having a mea.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's kind of fun to come back on to
Speaker 9: talk more about this, because the timing of when you
Speaker 9: had me on last time was pretty much ext just
Speaker 9: before a montha four he went public with this new
Speaker 9: stuff we're going to talk about.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so the last time we were talking about this,
Speaker 7: it was largely about stuff that was kind of like
Speaker 7: plausibly deniable for the administration, It was a lot of
Speaker 7: sort of stuff buried in bureaucratic medutia. Whether or not
Speaker 7: any of that stuff even exists anymore given recent Supreme
Speaker 7: Court rule that have effectively annihilated the administrative state. Who knows.
Speaker 7: But now having had the Supreme Court get their ability
Speaker 7: to do this sort of non plausibly, they have full
Speaker 7: lot gone on the record against trans kits. So I
Speaker 7: guess I want to start there. Can can you sort
Speaker 7: of explain what happened with this New York Times story
Speaker 7: that kind of kicked this whole saga off.
Speaker 9: Yeah, So kind of the context is I'm a trans
Speaker 9: policy analyst. It's what I do that unfortunately are not
Speaker 9: that many of us in the country, and all those
Speaker 9: of us, many of us are still employed in the
Speaker 9: movement organization, so they can't talk about this stuff humbly.
Speaker 9: But so he's been putting out the regulations that the
Speaker 9: Biden administration has been putting out are not good regulations
Speaker 9: for trans people, right, But it's hard to help people
Speaker 9: understand that they're transphobic because it's a five hundred page
Speaker 9: regulation and so you know, it's kind of wonky and
Speaker 9: a little weird, and if there is comms like the
Speaker 9: Biden administration and the orgs have been putting out calling
Speaker 9: him pro trans and all this stuff. There's a big
Speaker 9: barrier to overcome there with a wonky stuff like that.
Speaker 9: But what happened a couple of days after the debate,
Speaker 9: which I'm sure everyone saw, or if you didn't didn't
Speaker 9: watch it live, you realized in a horror that you
Speaker 9: now had to watch it to understand what this country
Speaker 9: is going through. They there was some initial reporting around
Speaker 9: how the WPATH Standards of Care Version eight came out.
Speaker 9: So WPATH is the World Professional Association for Transfer or Health.
Speaker 9: It is either last year or the year before they
Speaker 9: updated the Standards of Care seven to Standards of Care eight.
Speaker 9: This is a little background, sorry, And at the time
Speaker 9: there was discussion among WPATH members, doctors and kind of
Speaker 9: policy people to some degree about whether mentioning kind of
Speaker 9: rough ages for what time, what age people tend to
Speaker 9: start certain treatments like period blockers, hormones, that kind of thing,
Speaker 9: what kind of normal age ranges those things happening. We
Speaker 9: know from years years of advocacy and work and activism
Speaker 9: is that if somebody writes something like those things down,
Speaker 9: even if they present it as a kind of loose
Speaker 9: guideline or this is where things typically fall. Policymakers will
Speaker 9: write that stuff into law and rig and take what
Speaker 9: is supposed to give doctors and patients, you know, room
Speaker 9: to figure out what works best for them, and make
Speaker 9: it a very strict regime. And so transactivists did not
Speaker 9: want ages in the wpath Sock eight for that reason.
Speaker 9: And in the one and only instance of pro trans
Speaker 9: advocacy that I'm aware of her ever engaging in Rachel
Speaker 9: Levine in AHHS kind of advocated with wpath not to
Speaker 9: include those age ranges in it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Levine, by the way, is like the o WT health secretary.
Speaker 3: I think.
Speaker 7: Yeah, she's like the only trans like she's the.
Speaker 9: Highest ranked trans like you know, White House official ever
Speaker 9: of maggitude.
Speaker 7: She's like she's like the only transperson, like openly transperson
Speaker 7: possibly in history to ever like get to a position
Speaker 7: where she has some authority and she doesn't use it
Speaker 7: ever except this one time.
Speaker 9: It's a bit disappointment too. Was I was her biggest
Speaker 9: fan in the world because she passed. She wrote Pennsylvania's
Speaker 9: Narkann Standing Order, and I based my law in Louisiana
Speaker 9: legalizing Narkhan and our subsequent standing order on hers. So
Speaker 9: I thought it was really cool that Transforms had done
Speaker 9: this in both places, and I really really was a
Speaker 9: big and then she just crickets nothing. It is all
Speaker 9: this terrible stuff happens. So that's the context in which
Speaker 9: the New York Times was reporting. They somebody had gotten,
Speaker 9: like some bad guys had gotten some of the emails
Speaker 9: between Levin and w Path and were like trying to
Speaker 9: make it into a scandal, right, And they and the
Speaker 9: bad guys misrepresented kind of what the issue and discussion
Speaker 9: was about, right, So we discussed what it was, but
Speaker 9: the way that they would present it as, oh, you know,
Speaker 9: w Path was trying to limit treatments to kids being
Speaker 9: you know, old enough of a certain age, which is
Speaker 9: not what they were doing. And they were trying to
Speaker 9: present Levine as trying to get rid of those so
Speaker 9: that five year olds could have surgery or whatever. It's so,
Speaker 9: you know, just very very insincere. But so the media
Speaker 9: was kind of reporting just on that because they love
Speaker 9: muck breaking.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And partially the other thing we should mention it
Speaker 7: is it was really it was extremely hard to figure
Speaker 7: out what was going on for the issue reporting because
Speaker 7: the New York Times, instead of employing trans journalists, they
Speaker 7: employed transphobic journalists. And the thing about transpherbic journalists, they
Speaker 7: don't fucking understand policy at all. Day They're like, they're
Speaker 7: absolute fucking clouds. These people have no idea what the
Speaker 7: fuck they're talking about, and so you know, when they're
Speaker 7: trying to write a story that's about like leaked technical
Speaker 7: policy documents, they have no fucking idea what they're doing,
Speaker 7: and the reporting is gibberish. It's like I was trying
Speaker 7: to understand it. And this is a real issue because
Speaker 7: the only the source we had was this document of
Speaker 7: this New York Times writer who like couldn't like the
Speaker 7: New York Times writer who like couldn't find the back
Speaker 7: of their hand with the map right trying to like
Speaker 7: write out these skinned emails.
Speaker 9: I'm convinced sis people don't even understand that they don't
Speaker 9: know what they're talking about, because I think they just
Speaker 9: inherently feel like, oh, I have a gender, therefore I
Speaker 9: know everything about gender.
Speaker 7: It's like you know, and like I I I, and
Speaker 7: it's this is like mostly kind of like find ish.
Speaker 7: But the problem is when you have you know, when
Speaker 7: you have CIS journalists who don't know anything about trans
Speaker 7: like people at all, who in a lot of places
Speaker 7: don't think trans people exist trying to write these policy things,
Speaker 7: it's they they have nothing.
Speaker 9: And yeah, so it wasn't presented super clearly, and so
Speaker 9: other people had questions, some justified, some based on misunder
Speaker 9: that misunderstanding, some not. But anyway, there was additional kind
Speaker 9: of back and forth between the media and the White House.
Speaker 9: They were asking about it, and in that the White
Speaker 9: House at one point told them that they opposed surgery
Speaker 9: for transgender youth. And then obviously that is, at least publicly,
Speaker 9: that is a new position for the President who has
Speaker 9: has been called not by me but by other people,
Speaker 9: you know, one hundred percent pro trans super great ally
Speaker 9: his entire administration. I disagree with that, but other people
Speaker 9: have been saying that for a long time. And so
Speaker 9: that took a lot of people by surprise and was
Speaker 9: a big kind of kurf lefvel. And so that's kind
Speaker 9: of the jumping off point for where we're going here.
Speaker 1: And so that happened.
Speaker 9: That came out on a Friday in the New York Times,
Speaker 9: that the White House opposed surgery for trans miners, and
Speaker 9: nobody talked there like. There were no responses from the orgs,
Speaker 9: There was no additional reporting, no follow up from.
Speaker 1: The White House.
Speaker 9: That Friday, not that Saturday, not that Sunday, although that
Speaker 9: Sunday Sunday evening, the heads of three national large national
Speaker 9: LGBTQ advocacy orgs, HRC, Family Equality Council, and National LGBTQ
Speaker 9: Task Force went on all three together an MSNBC show.
Speaker 9: The host, I don't remember his name, but he has
Speaker 9: an MSNBC show, writes for Washington Post and then also
Speaker 9: contributes to PBS News Hour Right. And so none of
Speaker 9: these three people that we pay to advocate for us
Speaker 9: or this journalist brought up this very fresh, very pertinent,
Speaker 9: very relevant, new White House position. They just talked about
Speaker 9: how important it is to vote and how much fun
Speaker 9: they had at Pride parades instead garbage, right, And so
Speaker 9: it was very weird to me that these three people
Speaker 9: who represent lgbt obviously organizations would not immediately vocally condemned
Speaker 9: that kind of anti transtance. And it also blew my
Speaker 9: mind that this journalist must be like allergic to scoops
Speaker 9: or something like why yeah, why wouldn't you like that's
Speaker 9: your chance right there?
Speaker 7: I mean I I genuine and you think the journalists
Speaker 7: didn't know because like this stuff didn't break out of
Speaker 7: like a very small sort of like transphere by this point, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's in the New York Times.
Speaker 7: You're given like but like like nobody cares about like people.
Speaker 7: People don't care about us, like you. You would think
Speaker 7: that these people would know, But like I genuinely don't
Speaker 7: even know if this person had any idea what was happening.
Speaker 7: Because I trust journalists to write about trans people about
Speaker 7: as much as I trust myself to be able to
Speaker 7: bench for us a car.
Speaker 9: So you know, yeah, so that came and went Sunday
Speaker 9: evening Nope, And I was going in the whole time,
Speaker 9: right because for me as a trans policy analyst, you know,
Speaker 9: I have I've been I've noticed and been and been
Speaker 9: calling Biden's transphobic rags and executive words and stuff problematic
Speaker 9: and transphobic since I first noticed it and picked up
Speaker 9: on it, which was you know, two or three years
Speaker 9: ago now. And so for me, it was a very
Speaker 9: kind of complicated feeling of Okay, Now, at least other
Speaker 9: people don't have to take my word about the rags.
Speaker 9: There's something they can look at and see it themselves.
Speaker 9: But I was also, you know, completely threw off my
Speaker 9: sleep schedule. I was bouncing off the walls, going and
Speaker 9: seing and trying to you know, or organize responses. And
Speaker 9: so the first org actually I think I believe it
Speaker 9: was HRC, issued a statement Monday night and it was
Speaker 9: a decent statement. I might have critiques of them whatever,
Speaker 9: And then the rest of the orgs kind of didn't
Speaker 9: issue statements until Tuesday evening, and so so that Tuesday
Speaker 9: also the White House issued a statement that to clarify
Speaker 9: their position, and the statement actually made it worse. So
Speaker 9: what the statement said was that they do oppose surgery
Speaker 9: for transgender youth. So they reiterated that, and then it
Speaker 9: went on to say, however, we continue to support gender
Speaker 9: affirming care for youth, such as mental health care.
Speaker 1: Period.
Speaker 9: I meant it was a common in theas other but
Speaker 9: they didn't list other things that they supported, right, so, like,
Speaker 9: the only thing they put in the list that they
Speaker 9: supported was mental health care, which, to a policy person, again,
Speaker 9: you're not sneaking those things past me. If you're talking
Speaker 9: about trans healthcare and the only thing that you say
Speaker 9: that you support is mental health care, I'm very worried.
Speaker 9: I'm very concerned, right, because if you're pro trans and
Speaker 9: you support transaccess to healthcare, it is not complicated or
Speaker 9: hard or controversial for you to say, yeah, you know,
Speaker 9: I support trans people and their access to health care.
Speaker 9: They should have access to therapy, hormones, pubity blockers, surgery,
Speaker 9: whatever they need. Like, it's not complex there, right, But
Speaker 9: they didn't do that, and so to me that felt
Speaker 9: even worse than kind of the initial position because it
Speaker 9: signaled to me that there's likely we're likely kind of
Speaker 9: losing them on not just surgery, it's all this other stuff.
Speaker 9: And so two hours later that statement was updated, revised
Speaker 9: and it took out saying they support mental health care
Speaker 9: and was changed to say we support gender affirming care
Speaker 9: like a continuum of care and used the words continuum
Speaker 9: of care instead of mental health care. Now that doesn't
Speaker 9: that feels like tripling down to me, because the problem
Speaker 9: was that it was very overt what you left out,
Speaker 9: and you had the opportunity to go back and fix it,
Speaker 9: and then you continued. You just made new words that
Speaker 9: very overtly leave out the kind of things that we
Speaker 9: would need reassurance about, right, And so that's kind of
Speaker 9: where things were at at that point.
Speaker 7: And yeah, we're gonna let's let's leave it there for
Speaker 7: a second. You turn to the people who are funding
Speaker 7: us talking about this, which is the I was gonna say,
Speaker 7: the noble product products and services. I cannot promise their
Speaker 7: nobility at all, but the products and service system support
Speaker 7: this podcast.
Speaker 3: Here they are.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and we are back.
Speaker 7: And there's one other thing I want to mention before
Speaker 7: we sort of get into where this went, which is
Speaker 7: part of the fear that was going on, is that
Speaker 7: at the same time as this is all happening, Labor
Speaker 7: has taken power in the UK, and the Labor government
Speaker 7: they're fucking okay, what what what can what what can
Speaker 7: I say about the about West streeting that won't get
Speaker 7: me impaled across there? Militantly transphobic piece of shit. I
Speaker 7: think it's like their health secretary now, yes, yeah, the
Speaker 7: masters over there don't forget Yeah, yeah, they're ministers came
Speaker 7: out and said we're going to ban all children from
Speaker 7: getting puberty blockers, not.
Speaker 1: Just on the NHS but all.
Speaker 7: Private healthcare everyone. Yeah, and this is a this is
Speaker 7: an absolutely sort of terrifying step. It is going to
Speaker 7: get a lot of kids killed. Want to reiterate, Yeah,
Speaker 7: already already has there's a whole scandal over there about
Speaker 7: like about the number of trus.
Speaker 9: The Good Law Project has you know, done the research
Speaker 9: into like NHS minutes and all this stuff, and as
Speaker 9: thinks that there have been sixteen suicides since this.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And I I also want to there's like a
Speaker 7: sort of debunking thing that's going on that was from
Speaker 7: data that like that that the party released. I was like, oh,
Speaker 7: there weren't actually that many suicides. And the thing you
Speaker 7: have to understand about those numbers is that those numbers
Speaker 7: don't count people in waitlists, and the waitlists are not
Speaker 7: the only place that people die, but they kill a
Speaker 7: lot of people. So I want to sort of like, yeah,
Speaker 7: we got to get that sort of context in which
Speaker 7: is we're in this position not.
Speaker 9: Just streating right the farmers and then there are a
Speaker 9: whole lot have very vocally transphobic labor MPs.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and and that you know, that's there's a lot
Speaker 7: of fear that the Democratic Party can sort of take
Speaker 7: this even more extreme path than the sort of stuff
Speaker 7: we've been saying. And you know, I'm gonna include the
Speaker 7: standard thing about puberty blockers, which is we give these
Speaker 7: We give puberty blockers to like literal like five year
Speaker 7: old CIS children. They're fine, it's complete, like they're completely safe.
Speaker 7: There's no there's no downside.
Speaker 9: Apparently puberty blockers only have dangerous terrifying side effects used
Speaker 9: and they can tell when they're in a transbody, and
Speaker 9: it's a fine.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I only do the bad things. We've created the
Speaker 7: trends specific bio weapon like you know, so like that
Speaker 7: this all of this stuff is safe, and it's not
Speaker 7: only safe, it saves lives, like the difference between you know,
Speaker 7: like any trans person can tell you, the difference between
Speaker 7: being on your hormones and being off your hormones is
Speaker 7: night and day. It is the difference between being alive
Speaker 7: and not being alive, Like it is the difference between
Speaker 7: having sort of like a stable like stable interiority and
Speaker 7: feeling like you don't exist every fucking day.
Speaker 9: So well, we're not just talking about being on your
Speaker 9: right hormones, but in this case, we're also talking about
Speaker 9: preventing being on the wrong hormones, right, which can be
Speaker 9: even more experciated.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's terrible, Like yeah, and so there's there's this
Speaker 7: real fear that what we're seeing here is a pivot
Speaker 7: to UK style stuff. And one of the things I
Speaker 7: do in the UK that was specifically worrying about that
Speaker 7: language about mental health care is one of the big
Speaker 7: turf tactics is pushing this thing where we go, oh, well,
Speaker 7: we're going to have this like you know, we're gonna
Speaker 7: give you mental health care. We're going to like help
Speaker 7: you figure out what your gender is. Is they call
Speaker 7: it like exploratory care. This is conversion therapy. Yeah, that's
Speaker 7: what they are talking about. And you know, seeing the
Speaker 7: White House suddenly pivot to this language that is effectively
Speaker 7: identical to again the UK thing where they're like, we're
Speaker 7: going to give these consciversion therapy was terrifying.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 9: And then so the I think that the space between
Speaker 9: that Friday with the New York Times article and then
Speaker 9: the Tuesday with that clarification, I think the fact that
Speaker 9: the orgs were so quiet and didn't offer any pushback
Speaker 9: and didn't organize community to demand better to ban their
Speaker 9: retract it. Like I think that that's what gave them
Speaker 9: the room to essentially double and triple down in that
Speaker 9: statement on Tuesday. And so that coincided, unfortunately with a
Speaker 9: couple other anti transdevelopments in the Democratic Party in a
Speaker 9: way that I find very worrying, especially when taken kind
Speaker 9: of as a constellation. Right, So, that same week, the
Speaker 9: Senate Armed Services Committee. So the NDAA is a large
Speaker 9: military funding bill, the National Events Authorization Act, and the
Speaker 9: House has been passing versions with lots of transphobic riders
Speaker 9: in them, and then for the last couple of years,
Speaker 9: the Senate has been taking those out and passing a
Speaker 9: clean version, and then ultimately it's a clean version of
Speaker 9: that gets an active Last year, I was very, very
Speaker 9: worried that we would lose on that and that it
Speaker 9: would go through with the writers and the implications here.
Speaker 9: So the DoD Department of Events funds healthcare for the
Speaker 9: VA and Trycare. I think there's one other smaller program
Speaker 9: kind of similar that's a different name and effort, but
Speaker 9: largely VA and tringcare so for active service members and
Speaker 9: their families and veterans, which is I think I last
Speaker 9: read like ten million people or something. And so if
Speaker 9: they cut off public funding for trans healthcare through those programs,
Speaker 9: a whole lot of people are going to lose it,
Speaker 9: and we're going to very quickly wind up in a
Speaker 9: situation like abortion is with the High Amendment, where no
Speaker 9: public money can be used on our healthcare. And so
Speaker 9: that week, the same time, the Senate Armed Services Committee
Speaker 9: had their version of the NDAA, and Committee Joe Manchin
Speaker 9: voted with Republicans to attach to these transphobic riders to it,
Speaker 9: and then it was everyone in the committee except for
Speaker 9: three people. I believe it was Warren, one other Democrat,
Speaker 9: and I think possibly one Republican who voted against it.
Speaker 9: But all the other Democrats on the committee voted to
Speaker 9: pass it out of committee with those transphobic riders, which
Speaker 9: is terrifying. Yeah, and Senator Kelly has introduced a floor
Speaker 9: amendment to take those out, but whether his mimit even
Speaker 9: makes it to the floor, I don't know. And what
Speaker 9: the vote looks like that like on that, I don't know.
Speaker 9: So I'm really worried that the NDA will pass with
Speaker 9: these riders in it, and then subsequent spending bills for
Speaker 9: other departments will as well. And then simultaneously there's the
Speaker 9: third thing. Over Biden's term, there have been over he's
Speaker 9: had over two hundred of his judicial nominees that he's
Speaker 9: offered up and over his whole term, not a single
Speaker 9: time has a Democrat opposed one of his judicial nominees.
Speaker 9: But that week us Off actually opposed one of his
Speaker 9: judicial nominees over the fact that she had sent a
Speaker 9: trans woman to women's prison, so specifically a transphobic reason
Speaker 9: for objecting, and so she didn't denominated. And that's the
Speaker 9: first time that has happened over Biden's term from what
Speaker 9: I read, And so there are just lots of these
Speaker 9: signals that kind of back me up in my feeling
Speaker 9: that the support that you know, everyone has been pretending
Speaker 9: that the Democratic Party has for trans people. I mean,
Speaker 9: I read their eggs, so I know better, but it
Speaker 9: is not. It is an illusion, right, and when it shatters,
Speaker 9: it's going to come apart really fast, and people are
Speaker 9: going to be really surprised by it because our organizations
Speaker 9: have not been kind of educating people along the way.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna come back and talk more
Speaker 7: about this, and we're also going to come back very
Speaker 7: specifically to the trans woman in women's prisons thing, because
Speaker 7: I really truly do not think since people understand how
Speaker 7: fucking bad that is. Yeah, we're gonna come back to
Speaker 7: that after these ads. Yeah, so we're back. Yeah. So
Speaker 7: I wanted to specifically highlight the prisons thing in the
Speaker 7: context of you know, Okay, so there's a chance by
Speaker 7: the time this comes out that Biten is no longer
Speaker 7: than m me your lips to God tears.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 7: The issue with this is that the strongest possibility for
Speaker 7: replacing him is Kamala Harris. And you know, I'm gonna
Speaker 7: ask you to explain Kamala Harris's record on trans women
Speaker 7: in fucking prisons because it is appalling.
Speaker 9: Because I can never escape these Shipler. I actually worked
Speaker 9: at TLC while we were suing the State of California. Yeah,
Speaker 9: Transgender Lassoner TLC. We had to sue the State of
Speaker 9: California for incarcerated trans people to be able to access
Speaker 9: healthcare that they deserved, and Kamala Harris, as the age
Speaker 9: of the State of California, defended the state's position that
Speaker 9: they did not they did have a right to healthcare.
Speaker 9: We won, she lost, But so she is not someone
Speaker 9: that I can ever trust with trans lives, right, especially
Speaker 9: because there have been other issues, I think marijuana most recently,
Speaker 9: where she has tried to kind of trumpet that she
Speaker 9: has used her discretion and not prosecuted certain things or whatever. Right,
Speaker 9: And that doesn't help me at all, right, because it
Speaker 9: shows you know, you have prosecutor, you know you have
Speaker 9: discretion in what cases you take and what you defend
Speaker 9: and all this stuff, and you used it to prevent
Speaker 9: trans people.
Speaker 1: I'm geting healthcare.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And I want to also specifically talk about the
Speaker 7: part about this judge sending a transfer into a women's prison,
Speaker 7: which is the thing that you should do, because this
Speaker 7: is the kind of thing that has to be opposed
Speaker 7: at all costs, because you know, prison is violent enough
Speaker 7: for everyone, it is even worse for us. And the
Speaker 7: fact that Democrats are like, you know, it looks like
Speaker 7: we're seeing the sort of tide break on this and
Speaker 7: especially specifically on this issue where the consequences are so
Speaker 7: dire it is, it is extremely bad.
Speaker 9: Yeah, And so I kind of had the suspicion that
Speaker 9: there was a deal struck on the NDAA that Democrats
Speaker 9: And this is solely me speculating, right, I have no
Speaker 9: insider information about this, speculating that the Democrats kind of
Speaker 9: accepted a deal on the NDA that there would be
Speaker 9: some level of anti trans writers that they would accept
Speaker 9: and into the enacted law, and that after making that deal,
Speaker 9: the White House felt they could kind of move to
Speaker 9: the right publicly on trans people because you know, it
Speaker 9: would be in the news from the NBA passing, that
Speaker 9: they could start kind of preparing people for that by
Speaker 9: kind of making a public and kind of moving to
Speaker 9: the right word there.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 1: So that's kind of what I suspect maybe happened. I
Speaker 1: don't know, but it is.
Speaker 9: It doesn't vode well for us, especially because you know,
Speaker 9: so the the White House's position has already been cited
Speaker 9: in at least one judicial opinion. Ye and then was
Speaker 9: also recently cited Yester the day before yesterday or not now, yeah, Friday,
Speaker 9: I think it was Friday in New Hampshire as justification
Speaker 9: from Governor Sunu for signing their surgery van there. And
Speaker 9: so these things have immediate consequences even before they show
Speaker 9: up in executive branch policy. And this is why I
Speaker 9: have been very convinced ever since kind of I read
Speaker 9: the policy Tea Leaves and the Executive orders and rags
Speaker 9: and kind of identified that we were dealing with the
Speaker 9: functionally a hostile executive branch.
Speaker 1: I've been trying. I tried as hard.
Speaker 9: As I could to get movement leadership to switch from
Speaker 9: a kiss ass framework to a take names framework, right Yeah,
Speaker 9: but they just they haven't done it. So the community
Speaker 9: just doesn't. It's going to feel like whiplash, I think
Speaker 9: for a lot of folks who aren't kind of deep
Speaker 9: into this stuff and then don't follow me on Twitter
Speaker 9: to see me yelling about five hundred page regulations. But
Speaker 9: it makes me worried that, you know, the leadership is
Speaker 9: not advocating for trans people appropriately. And I think that
Speaker 9: if this is demonstrating that they're not don't have leverage
Speaker 9: or they're not willing to bring a leverage to bear
Speaker 9: on whoever the nominee is when it's not Biden, right, Like,
Speaker 9: they're not setting the movement up to have strong footing
Speaker 9: to hold people accountable to trans equality kind of on
Speaker 9: the campaign trail, and that's really scary looking at labor,
Speaker 9: especially as kind of a blueprint.
Speaker 7: Yeah we're gonna be talking of God, Yeah, we're gonna
Speaker 7: be talking about shot o'brien'soking dog shit weird fascist turn
Speaker 7: later with some teamsters. Well hopefully, well we'll see well
Speaker 7: see well see apps the episode. But yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 7: very bad. But also it's not We're not in a
Speaker 7: position yet where this is inevitable, right right, Like it
Speaker 7: doesn't have to happen. And the way that it gets
Speaker 7: this gets stopped from happening is by US organizing, in
Speaker 7: US fighting and US putting pressure on these people to
Speaker 7: fucking do this because you know, and like this, this
Speaker 7: is this, this has always been the thing. Like these
Speaker 7: people unfortunately they do need us, right, they hate it,
Speaker 7: but you know, these like the Democratic Party needs us.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 9: We got to see last month during Pride month, they
Speaker 9: all show up at Pride parades. Yeah yeah right, it's
Speaker 9: like y'all actually don't belong here, Why.
Speaker 4: Are you fuck off?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 7: And it's like you know, they like they they they
Speaker 7: they have been successfully sort of like feasting off of
Speaker 7: the movement that we build for decades now. And it
Speaker 7: is you know, if they're going to fucking if they're
Speaker 7: going to fucking eat our corpses, it is, it is,
Speaker 7: it is, it is absolutely time for them to fucking
Speaker 7: try to defend us. And the only way that's going
Speaker 7: to happen is if we we actually start mobilizing it,
Speaker 7: we start putting pressure on these people to like not
Speaker 7: fucking back down and write us off for dead.
Speaker 9: But the way that the national organizations have been moving, right,
Speaker 9: like the positive press and the praise that they've given
Speaker 9: deepen Biden's shittiest actions and inactions on trans people actively
Speaker 9: stimy's commune you organizing, right, because if I have to
Speaker 9: explain a five hundred page regulation to show people that
Speaker 9: Biden's transphobic, that and they're just like no, but look,
Speaker 9: this HRC statement says it's actually great policy, it's a
Speaker 9: big barrier to overcome or community organizing there, right.
Speaker 7: So yeah, and you know, the the the other sort
Speaker 7: of issue here, right, is that the Republican Party is
Speaker 7: I mean, I don't know if hurling towards is even
Speaker 7: the right word, but they are They are very very
Speaker 7: very close to what is effectively like banning Transmit from
Speaker 7: public life and their eventual goal of wiping us out.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and you know, if there's no actual force to
Speaker 7: oppose that, because all of these sort of national organizations
Speaker 7: are busy sort of kissing ass instead of actually fighting.
Speaker 7: We are in deep trouble.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and I think and I think we are. I
Speaker 9: think we are in deep trouble. But like you said,
Speaker 9: it is not a done yet right. I was actually heartened.
Speaker 1: I was very I was terrified.
Speaker 9: So Zoe Zoe's Ephyr, the trans representative state representative from Montana.
Speaker 9: After the draft bad Title nine regulation came out, she
Speaker 9: organized an open letter from fourteen out of sixteen out
Speaker 9: trans and non binary state electeds against it. They released
Speaker 9: it a couple of days after all of the orgs
Speaker 9: put out their praise were they're praising statements and they
Speaker 9: looked really dumb. So she actually organized another open letter
Speaker 9: of out trans and non binary state legislators against this.
Speaker 9: It wasn't the you know, the full compliment because it
Speaker 9: was over a weekend, really scrambly, but just like the
Speaker 9: Title nine one, Dana Carome and Sarah McBride did not
Speaker 9: sign it.
Speaker 7: Why can you explain who that is by the way
Speaker 7: for the audience.
Speaker 9: Yeah, So Dana Carome is a trans state representative from Virginia,
Speaker 9: and then Sarah McBride is an out trans legislator from
Speaker 9: Biden's home state of Delaware. And the mc brides are
Speaker 9: actually family friends with the Bidens, and Joe Biden actually
Speaker 9: wrote the forward to Sarah McBride's memoirs, autobiography whatever you
Speaker 9: call it, right, But she's also a Zionist, and she
Speaker 9: is a kind of centrist, center right Democrat who you know,
Speaker 9: as I've talked to people, my understanding is that she
Speaker 9: didn't sign on to the title nine letter because she
Speaker 9: has you know, rising Star and the Democratic Party aspirations.
Speaker 9: She's probably going to be the first trans congress person soon.
Speaker 9: I hate it, and so I was extremely concerned that
Speaker 9: Sarah McBride, who you know, because of those ties and
Speaker 9: because she's probably going to be in Congress soon, is
Speaker 9: the most kind of politically powerful trans person in the country.
Speaker 9: I was extremely worried that she was going to join
Speaker 9: the Biden administration on this. So I agro posted the
Speaker 9: ship posts that are for several days, and thankfully she
Speaker 9: she did condemn it and kind.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, go.
Speaker 9: I was seriously concerned about that because you know, just
Speaker 9: these the forces, this anti transit humanization campaign is so
Speaker 9: powerful and so strong at this point that a lot
Speaker 9: of people are making the calculation that if they want
Speaker 9: to advance in politics.
Speaker 1: They got a multuous you know, and I.
Speaker 9: Don't think highly id and don't think highly enough and
Speaker 9: Sarah to have been confident that she wouldn't do that, yeah, And.
Speaker 7: I think that's you know, that's also one of the
Speaker 7: really hard parts about this is like you, I don't know,
Speaker 7: as much as there is sort of intercommunity solidarity among
Speaker 7: trans people, you can't even trust your own people when
Speaker 7: they take power right, right, And you know, this isn't
Speaker 7: to say like this is one of the rare times
Speaker 7: where like I think there are like there's legislators who
Speaker 7: do good stuff, like Zoey's effort has been doing great,
Speaker 7: But you have to keep the pressure on everyone, no
Speaker 7: matter who they are about it, where they come from,
Speaker 7: you have to you have to keep pressuring them, because I.
Speaker 1: Mean, that's my experience as now does.
Speaker 7: Yeah, if you don't, we're going to get We're going
Speaker 7: to get left behind and left to die. Yeah.
Speaker 9: And so like one of the one of the ways
Speaker 9: that this has been so dismaying for me, right is
Speaker 9: that trans people don't have any or any national organization
Speaker 9: that advocates for them full throatdly, principally in a trans
Speaker 9: maximalist kind of unapologetic way, right, it's always all of
Speaker 9: the orgs, all the lgbtq worgs and the Transpacific orgs,
Speaker 9: which is kind of what I'm getting to all kind
Speaker 9: of take this very.
Speaker 1: Centrist tech or they have over the last several years
Speaker 1: with Biden.
Speaker 9: They were all kind of a lot happier to be
Speaker 9: radical when Trump is pres but no longer. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 9: And my my main issue is even if you are,
Speaker 9: you know, a rich DC strategist who leads, who runs
Speaker 9: these movement orgs like you know they are, and you believe,
Speaker 9: even you believe that the balance between kind of strident,
Speaker 9: principled advocacy and lobbying blazer tightened up moderated advocacy is
Speaker 9: way further in the moderated direction than I do.
Speaker 1: Even if you believe that, you still.
Speaker 9: Understand the need for some group with a voice to
Speaker 9: articulate the trans maximalist position, to articulate the standards by
Speaker 9: which you know, politicians are going to be measured if
Speaker 9: they're going to be considered pro trans.
Speaker 1: And what we have not seen is the trans.
Speaker 9: Specific organization, so specifically National Center for transgener Quality n
Speaker 9: CT and Transferred Legal Education Defense Fund, till death. They
Speaker 9: recently merged into Advocates for Trans Equality, which is abbreviated
Speaker 9: A for a te don't ask, don't ask, But like,
Speaker 9: why let the LGBT, let HRC do the centrist bullshit,
Speaker 9: Let them put out milk toast statements, let them praise
Speaker 9: politicians who don't fully support us. Right, but we need
Speaker 9: at least one organization representing trans people to lay out
Speaker 9: the full case to present kind of our actual policy
Speaker 9: needs and be the rubric by which everyone else can
Speaker 9: be measured. And also just for community education, so we know,
Speaker 9: so the community knows without you know, people like organizers,
Speaker 9: people like me trying to overcome these huge, these huge
Speaker 9: walls to get people to understand what's going on, can
Speaker 9: see what's being done to us, know what we deserve
Speaker 9: in terms of policy, and then measure what is actually
Speaker 9: being done for us against that bar.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And I think one of the other frustrating aspects
Speaker 7: of this is something that you talk about a lot,
Speaker 7: is that the people who do the work in these organizations, right,
Speaker 7: you're sort of like, you know, your sort of staffers
Speaker 7: or researchers to people on the on the sort of
Speaker 7: bottom of the pyramid. You make all this stuff function.
Speaker 7: They don't get a say in how these you know,
Speaker 7: and how how these fucking orgers put these things out.
Speaker 9: No, most of them are radical anarchists and communists like
Speaker 9: I am right. They they really really want to do
Speaker 9: what we need to be done, and it's just you know,
Speaker 9: comes down from on high that that's not what they're doing.
Speaker 9: And I know that I am not the only trans
Speaker 9: National ORG staffer who has been silenced by the White
Speaker 9: House or the White House reached out directly to my bosses.
Speaker 9: I think I mentioned it the last time I was
Speaker 9: on Yeah, but I know that's happened to my colleagues,
Speaker 9: friends at other organizations. And I know that I have
Speaker 9: a lot of privileges that that a lot of people don't,
Speaker 9: so I can kind of get fired or I could.
Speaker 9: I do not maybe couldn't afford it anymore. I get
Speaker 9: fired for my principles, and I don't, you know, I don't,
Speaker 9: I don't judge, you know, my my comrades and colleagues
Speaker 9: horstal kind of doing the best they can. But I'm
Speaker 9: really really scared with with leadership and the way that
Speaker 9: they have not recognized kind of the situation they've gotten a.
Speaker 7: Sent to Yeah, and I think the thing I want
Speaker 7: to close on is what do you think are effective
Speaker 7: things that people can do sort of now right? And
Speaker 7: people who aren't in the top of these power structures.
Speaker 7: Although if you're for some reason you're the head of
Speaker 7: one of these orgs and you're listening to this, what
Speaker 7: the fuck are you doing? Please do better?
Speaker 2: But yeah, what what?
Speaker 7: What?
Speaker 6: What?
Speaker 7: What kinds of things can people do on top of
Speaker 7: sort of just like community education?
Speaker 9: And yeah, yeah, so, I mean I I think the
Speaker 9: real thing that I mean, I've courage people to do
Speaker 9: this on Twitter as well, is if you see one
Speaker 9: of these national organizations fall short of one hundred percent
Speaker 9: and advocating for a transop, if you see them equivocate
Speaker 9: about you know, maybe banning surgery isn't that bad because
Speaker 9: it's not super common, or maybe it's okay not to
Speaker 9: demand that Biden, you know, explicitly say that he supports
Speaker 9: you know, these parts of these components of our healthcare
Speaker 9: before calling him on hundred percent protrans on healthcare.
Speaker 1: You know, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 9: If you see them fall short of that, you know,
Speaker 9: don't trust them anymore. I don't donate to them anymore.
Speaker 9: Take that money, attention, time, and energy and turn it
Speaker 9: to mutual aid efforts, to local organizing efforts to supporting
Speaker 9: trans people in Red states. Campaign for southerner Quality just
Speaker 9: expanded their their practical support program to be not just
Speaker 9: a subset of of Red states that they will help
Speaker 9: trans youth in families in, but all Red states that
Speaker 9: are that are facing healthcare bands and similar anti trans measures.
Speaker 9: Support that fund right, go look at and if you
Speaker 9: don't know of a of a local trans group or
Speaker 9: a state transgroup near you doing good work, you can
Speaker 9: go to transjustice funding projects kind of grantee map. They're
Speaker 9: really low barrier only grant to translated groups and you
Speaker 9: can see what those groups are doing and you can
Speaker 9: hook up with them or donate to them. But I
Speaker 9: think that the biggest thing is not I mean, we
Speaker 9: Lord knows, we need money, we're all poor as shit, yeah,
Speaker 9: But mainly, but mostly honestly, what I think we need
Speaker 9: is we need vocal, visible support. We need assist people
Speaker 9: not to remain silent or passive when they hear or
Speaker 9: see transphobia, or when they hear or see someone equivocating
Speaker 9: on well maybe you know, maybe kids aren't old enough
Speaker 9: to know their trands. Like if you're that just sounds
Speaker 9: insane actual trans people, right, but you know it can
Speaker 9: take this people, right, And so if you are a
Speaker 9: SIS ally, being an ally is an action, right, And
Speaker 9: we need that now more than ever as the stakes
Speaker 9: of the risks of being attached to us supporting us
Speaker 9: grow higher, right, Like, we need principal allies to stand
Speaker 9: with us. And so if you can do that in
Speaker 9: your daily life, you can be a trans advocate in
Speaker 9: your kind of routine.
Speaker 1: We desperately need that.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And I think that's a good I know that
Speaker 7: that's a good sort of rallying cry. It's like all
Speaker 7: all you know, and this has always substantively been one
Speaker 7: of the big issues with being trans is that we
Speaker 7: are one percent of the population right now. Right, that's
Speaker 7: probably gonna rise in the future, but right now are
Speaker 7: sort of distributed pauls, like our distributed impacts on politics.
Speaker 7: You know, we have an outsized impact of paul But
Speaker 7: for one percent of the population, we can't fight nine
Speaker 7: percent of the population, right, So we need we need
Speaker 7: your help, and we need you know, we need not
Speaker 7: just sort of milk toast lip service.
Speaker 9: We need to actually fight, Yeah, we need people in
Speaker 9: your life to know you know that you are fully
Speaker 9: pro trands and that means that you kind of learned
Speaker 9: maybe how to talk about trans healthcare to educate other
Speaker 9: folks who won't know as much, or you are able
Speaker 9: to develop and kind of share a personal story about
Speaker 9: how you learned about trans people and uh and became
Speaker 9: you know, an outlying right, So learning how to do
Speaker 9: that work I think is super important.
Speaker 7: So this is this is spinning can happen here, Kriinn,
Speaker 7: Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 9: Like I said that timing of the last show, Yeah,
Speaker 9: very smart.
Speaker 7: It's yeah, we I have I have a weird knack
Speaker 7: for tibing this stuff correctly for mostly for but you know, yeah,
Speaker 7: just been nicking up here. You can find us in
Speaker 7: the places and yeah, go go support the trans people
Speaker 7: in your life because the Lord knows they need it.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and you can follow me. Yeah, so I'm crankering,
Speaker 9: I share they pronouns, and I'm at gay Narcan on Twitter.
Speaker 9: You can find me there for hot trans policy takes
Speaker 9: that are not moderated by centrist calm staff.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and don't find me on Twitter. Absolutely not.
Speaker 2: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the Universe.
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