It Could Happen Here Weekly 125

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Al Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 3 (00:26):
Hello, everybody, Welcome to It could happen here. This is
Sharene and today is a very special day. It is
the first of April, April Fool's Day. Someone may or
may not have been born on this day. But little
known fact that I didn't know about until I was
an adult was that the first of April is historically

(00:47):
Syrian New Year. That's right. I learned about this as
a Syrian in my mid twenties, so it's not exactly
very well known, but when I learned about it, I
got obsessed with it. So I'm going to talk about
that and just the history of April Fool's Day and
how it became April Fool's Day, in particular because originally,

(01:08):
as I said, it started as the Syrian New Year,
and many researchers consider it the oldest recorded holiday in
the history of the Near East. The Syrian calendar is
also considered one of the last remaining ancient calendars that
is still celebrated. Up until now, he had uns no relation,
but he's a doctor in archaeology in Ancient Languages at
the University of Damascus. He said that the celebrations of

(01:31):
the New year coincided with the celebrations of the arrival
of spring, and they began the day of the vernal equinox,
and they continued until the first of April, a Syrian
New Year's day. This day is associated with the celebration
of the end of the reigning season and the start
of fertility and the growth of crops and fruits, as

(01:52):
the celebrations were accompanied with religious rituals in which offerings
were made. Unis also noted that the Syrian calendar is
related to Ishtad, who is the first mother goddess, the
goddess of life, the morning and evening star. At the
same time, the ancient texts describe Ashtar as in her
mouth lies the secrets of life. The word astar comes

(02:15):
from the Akkadian language. She is known as Anana or
Nana in Sumerian. And she was the first deity for
which we have written evidence of, as well as the
world's first goddess of love and war. And she had
a lover named Tammuz in ancient Mesopotamia, which roughly corresponds
to modern Iraq parts of Iran, Syria, Kuwait, and Turkey.

(02:38):
Love was a powerful force capable of upending earthly order
and producing sharp changes in status and Ashtar definitely deserves
an episode all for herself. She's completely fascinating and needs
more than just a blurb. But I had to at
least mention her, and maybe one day I'll do an
episode about her. But that's a Shtar for you for now.

(02:58):
There are other researchers, though, that have criticized the validity
of April first as the Syrian New Year. Because of this,
the origin of the Syrian New Year's a key to
celebration aki Tu. It has sparked some controversy, with debates
fueled by history and religion. The validity of the ritual
is disputed because it is not widely celebrated locally and

(03:21):
its relevance is not generally accepted by academia. Some would
argue that the celebration of Syrian New Year is useless.
Among them is Bashar Khalif, who is a history researcher
specializing in the Mashrich Calif says the celebrating a key
to quote stems from nostalgia and an attempt to escape

(03:41):
the present. So what are the origins of a key
to A key to marks the Assyrian and Babylonian New Year,
and it is observed the first of April and last
twelve days. The Akkadians and Chaldeans also have celebrated the holiday.
Doctor Joseph is a tune fun fact. Zetun means olive,
what a cute name. Doctor Joseph Zetun is an expert

(04:04):
in Syrian history, and he is one of the historians
who considers ake to quote the oldest recorded holiday in
the history of the Near East. The earliest reference to
this holiday dates back to twenty five hundred BC in
er U are Er was an important Sumerian city state
in ancient Mesopotamia, located at the site of modern Tel

(04:26):
l Moreyed and South Irax dir Klar Governorate. According to
Syrian researchers, the Akitu holiday was quote held for the
Sumerian moon god Nana. For the Babylonians, it chronicled the
god Marduk's victory over the goddess Timayat. During the Babylonian era.
The first four days were traditionally reserved for religious rituals.

(04:49):
Babylonians used to offer prayers and sacrifices and recite the
anuma Alish, which is the Babylonian epic of creation. The
remaining days would include social and political rituals. According to
the researcher Hazad and Majidi, the Sumerians observed this holiday
on March twenty first of every year, and this marked

(05:09):
the start of the Sumerian New Year. On the other hand,
Semitic peoples like the Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, they celebrate a
key to on April first. What is this word a
key to? I asked the same thing. I asked the
mom the same thing, because I'm still a child who
thinks my mom knows everything, but she doesn't. She doesn't
know what that means. She's ever even heard the word,

(05:31):
and she didn't know the origin of a ke to.
And apparently there's no consensus among historians on the exact
meaning of this word. However, researcher On Majdi details his
theory in the books Summer Corpus and Prehistoric Religions and Beliefs.
According to m. Majidi, the word a key to is
the name of the feast and the place where celebrations

(05:53):
were held. The word appeared in late Sumerian texts as
a key t. The word is then believed to be
of Sumerian origin. The sign ah means rain, Ki means earth,
and t is a verb meaning to draw near. Thus
it roughly translates to drawing water closer to the earth.

(06:15):
Very poetic, according to jam M Shahin, numerous ancient scriptures
mentioned the same aki t. For instance, the holiday bears
the name Akitu in Aramaic, Akiti sunonym in Sumerian, Visha,
Deshata in Akkadian, and Rabi Nissan in Assyrian. Nissan, by
the way, is April in Arabic. The shah Deshaeta and

(06:39):
Krabi Nissan are often used in the Levante to mean
head of the year and first of April, respectively. On
the other hand, doctor Mahmud Hossein and Amen wrote that
the celebrations were held at a specific location known as
the House of Celebrations or Akitu, which was outside the city,
so this makes a k to a location as well

(07:00):
well a sacred location. In ancient beliefs, the Akitu house
refers to the gods dwelling on earth. The purpose of
having a celebratory feast is to celebrate the gods choosing
to temporarily reside in this city, and the purpose of
this house is to guard and cherish that moment forever.
And Even though now the name Nissan is used for

(07:22):
what we know as the month of April, the month
of Nissan used to be around the time of the
vernal equinox, which starts around March twenty first. The vernal
equinox is still celebrated throughout Greater Iran as Nurus, which
means new Day on March twenty first. However, in ancient Assyrian,
Akkadian and Babylonian traditions, the spring festival was celebrated in

(07:44):
the first days of the month known as Nissan, and
the calendar adopted by ancient Assyrians had the month Nissan
at the beginning of the calendar year, which lends to
the term Kabi Nissan or the first of Nissan. So
let's talk about the Syrian calendar and April Fool's Day
what we all came here for. By the fact, about me,
my birthday is today, April fools Day.

Speaker 4 (08:05):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (08:06):
And I didn't even know about this history, as I said,
until I was an adult person in my mid twenties.
But once I learned about this history, especially as a
Syrian person who was really proud to be Syrian, it
really made me appreciate my birthday and my ancestry a
lot more because growing up, not gonna lie, it's honestly
a pain in the ass birthday. Lots of empty gift

(08:28):
boxes and people saying Happy Birthday, April Fools and just
me like rolling my eyes and grimacing throughout the entire day.
There is one particularly traumatic memory I have from middle
school where I was given a box of chocolates and
the joke was that the chocolates tasted like shit. And
I know this because I tasted a chocolate and then

(08:48):
I immediately spit it out. And to this day, I
don't know what that chocolate was made out of, and
I hope I never find out, But anyway, it's just
a weird ass birthday to have you know what else
is weird? Weird ass ads, listen and we are back. Okay.

(09:16):
Doctor ze Tune believes it is more accurate to call
the calendar that starts at April first as a Syrian
calendar rather than Assyrian, since all in Syria and Mesopotamia
adopted it. He also thinks that the ancient Syrian calendar
begins on the first of April, and that quote This
calendar was present and endured in multiple Syrian civilizations, including

(09:37):
the kingdoms of Ugadit, Elba, Mari, Palmyra, and Damascus until
the early twentieth century. Syrians traditionally began their year in
April first, but transitioned to the Western calendar during the
period of the French mandate, so it actually wasn't even
that long ago that April first marked the beginning of
the new year in Syria. The rituals of Assyrian New

(09:59):
Year are linked to April Fools. There are rituals aimed
at quote humbling the king, which would start from the
fifth day of the celebrations. Lying was also a big
part of the celebrations, as the king would abdicate his
throne in favor of a criminal sentenced to death. That
part is crazy to me. Enslaved people also became masters,

(10:21):
and people disguise themselves in costumes and masks to hide
their identities until they awoke from the lie the next morning.
So the whole day would be a farce essentially, and
you would all knowingly live a lie until the next
day everything is suddenly backed normal again. Hannasumi, head of
the Syriac Cultural Association in Syria, said, after the common

(10:46):
folk occupies the king's throne, he blends in with the
people incognito. Chaos ensues in Babylon and on the first
of April, the king is found and joy prevails, and
that is the origin of April Fool's Day. The king
did not truly disappear, It was but a charade. There's
also another reason the first of April is associated with

(11:07):
an April fool, doctor Shaheen writes. Until fifteen sixty four AD,
the Syrian calendar was adopted in most countries. In France,
celebrations started on March twenty first and ended on April first,
just as the Assyrians and Babylonians did thousands of years ago.
After King Charles the ninth adopted the new Gregorian calendar,

(11:29):
celebrations began on December twenty fifth and ended January first,
which we now all know is the beginning of the
new year. However, some of the publics still continued to
celebrate on April first, and the people who still held
onto this tradition became the target of mockery by the
nobility for still believing in April Fool's Day. Other historians
speculate that April fools Day dates back to fifteen eighty two,

(11:53):
when France switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar,
as called for by the Council of Trent in fifteen six.
In the Julian calendar, as well as the Syrian calendar
and also the Hindu calendar, the new year began with
the Spring equinox on April first, but people were slow
to get the news or they failed to recognize that

(12:13):
the start of the new year had moved to January first.
Those who continue to celebrate the new year during the
last week of March through April first became the butt
of jokes and hoaxes, and were called April Fools. These
pranks included having paper fish placed on their backs and
being referred to as april fish in French, which is
possan di'avril. I can't say that correctly, and I can't

(12:36):
even attempt to do a French accent. But it's the
april fish you refer to as an april fish and
symbolizing a young, easily caught fish and a gullible person.
So it's kind of like an elevated kick me sign
on your back. Interestingly enough, fish are also considered a
lucky symbol in many areas of the world, and are
also important to many New Year's traditions. There was an

(12:59):
opinion piece for a few years ago about the marginalization
of the holiday of Akitu as part of a quote
systemic battle against ancient civilizations. Doctor Shaheen noted that this
prohibition has continued until recently. Different regimes and religious figures
prohibited it because it is a pagan feast and has rituals, prayers,

(13:19):
and texts that offend the followers of the monotheistic religions.
He added that ak To is witnessing a renaissance among
the Assyrian, Chaldean and Syriac communities abroad, particularly as a
result of religious freedom. He asks will Akitu return or
is it merely a trend that will fade away once again.

(13:42):
Many cultures still recognize the significance of April first, including
the Assyrians. Despite being scattered across the world, Assyrians preserve
their history and heritage through holidays like Assyrian New Year
on April first, Assyrian New Year is the spring festival
among the indigenous Assyrians of non northern Iraq, northeastern Syria,

(14:02):
southeastern Turkey, and northwestern Iran. Celebrations involve parades and parties, food, music,
and dancing. Some Assyrians wear traditional costumes, are dressed like
Assyrian royalty, and dance for hours. Celebrations take place throughout
Assyria and other areas in the Middle East, along with
some in the United States, Europe, and Australia among the

(14:23):
Assyrian diaspora communities. The modern observance of aki To began
in the nineteen sixties during the Assyrian intellectual Renaissance. However,
due to political oppression, the celebrations were largely private until
the nineteen nineties, but the event is still largely celebrated
by Assyrians residing in Syria. Although the Syrian government does

(14:46):
not acknowledge the festival at all, Assyrians still continue with
the celebration. In two thousand and two, Assyrians and Syria
celebrated the event with a mass wedding of sixteen couples
and over twenty five thousand attendees. After the formation of Turkey,
Kabi Nissan, along with no Ruz, were banned from public celebration.

(15:07):
Assyrians and Turkey were first allowed to publicly celebrate Kabi
Nissan in two thousand and five after organizers received permission
from the government to stage the event and light of
democratic reforms adopted in support of Turkey's EU membership. Bid
Around five thousand people, including large groups of visiting ethnic
Assyrians from Europe, Syria and Iraq took part in the

(15:30):
Kabi Nissan celebrations in Turkey. One of the largest Assyrian
New Year celebrations took place in Iraq in two thousand
and eight. Public celebrations were not allowed by Saddam Hussein's
regime prior to the start of the Iraq War. The
event was organized by the Assyrian Democratic Movement ZOA and
between forty five thousand and sixty five thousand people took

(15:52):
part in the parade. In two thousand and four, George
Ridanovich of the California State Assembly recognized the Assyrian New
Year in a extended his wishes to the Assyrian community
in California. This was later followed by a letter from
our old California governor, Terminator Arnold to the Assyrian community
in California, congratulating them on the annual celebration. I just

(16:15):
thought that was pretty interesting because it is a very
modern resurgence and like renaissance of this day. So fun
facts and in the United States, almost four million Americans
can trace their roots back to an Arab country located
in the Middle East or North Africa. And this is
according to the Arab American Institute. Each year, many school districts, cities,

(16:39):
and states observe Arab American Heritage Month in April. It's
meant to honor the historic achievements and cultural contributions of
Arab Americans throughout the nation. On April first, twenty twenty two,
April was officially designated as National Arab American Heritage Month
by the federal government. The movement for this recognition was
first started in nineteen teen eighty nine, when Congress declared

(17:02):
October twenty fifth as a day to honor Arab American
Heritage and called it National Arab American Day, but the
Arab American community pushed for further recognition. In twenty seventeen,
a media outlet called Arab America, as well as a
nonprofit Arab America Foundation, launched an initiative that called all
lawmakers to make April National Arab American Heritage Month. Arab

(17:26):
America said that April was chosen because it did not
conflict with other observances that highlight marginalized communities, and that
the month symbolizes hope, growth and new beginnings. And yeah,
sure that can be true with spring starting and flowers
blooming and so on, but I think there might be
a little more symbolism there as well. Personally, I think

(17:48):
all national holidays are kind of useless unless you get
like a day off from work, and giving a marginalized
community a day or a month is a rather shallow
and also useless acknowledgement of that community. I mean, Columbus
also has a day himself, and even though many states
now observe it as Indigenous People's Day, sixteen states as
well as the territory of American Samoa still observe the

(18:09):
second Monday in October as the official public holiday exclusively
called Columbus Day. All this is to say that I
would rather lawmakers actually advocate for marginalized communities instead of
just tossing them a day or a few weeks where
suddenly they exist. It is still kind of cute to
me that Arab American Heritage Month is starting today in

(18:31):
April because of all the symbolism. Let's take our second break.
I don't have a clever segue. Oh well, and we
are back.

Speaker 5 (18:50):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (18:51):
Where else have we seen April fools Day in the world.
April Fool's Day has a shockingly global history for a
holiday devote to lies and deception. Historians have also linked
April Fool's Day to festivals such as Hilaria and ancient Rome.
Hilaria is Latin for joyful, and this day was celebrated

(19:12):
in ancient Rome at the end of March by followers
of the cult of Sabelle. It involved people dressing up
in disguises and mocking fellow citizens and even magistrates, and
it was said to be inspired by the Egyptian legend
of Isis, Osiris and Seth. There's also speculation that April
Fool's Day was tied directly to the vernal equinox or

(19:32):
the first day of spring in the Northern hemisphere, and
this is where Mother Nature fooled people with changing, unpredictable weather.

Speaker 5 (19:40):
I like that one.

Speaker 3 (19:42):
In Latin America, you have few chances to be pranked.
Much of Latin America celebrates Eldiya Delos and Ascentis or
Day of the Innocence, which is a late December Catholic
feast with an extremely unsilly origin that has now somehow
become a day of jokes and pranks. In Ebbi elec
Pant Spain, they mark this day aka they are April

(20:03):
Fool's Day in December by having a town wide food fight,
complete with military strategy and historical lore. Then there's the
Els and Fernat's tradition, which is reportedly more than two
hundred years old and involves a mock military style takeover
of the town where the new rulers get to make
up strange laws that others have to abide by, and

(20:25):
if they don't, they get fined and the money goes
to charity. When I was reading this earlier, I was like, oh,
this is the purge, but then it ends up money
goes to charity and it's like, oh, it's nice, but
so for those cultures, the day to watch out for
is December twenty eighth. In Brazil, however, April first is
still the prank day of choice, and they cut straight
to the chase by congate Dia das Mantidas, or the

(20:48):
Day of Lies. Similarly to Syria, Iran has one of
the oldest April Fool's traditions with the observance of Sista Badud,
which also has a prank playing element. It is celebrated
on the thirteenth day of the Persian New Year, on
April first or April second. SiZ Da Badad, which is
also said to have been celebrated as far back as

(21:08):
the fifth century BC, is translated as quote getting rid
of thirteen, so it has an appropriately superstitious air. It's
also considered a spring festival, which ties into other April
Fool's predecessors, like the ancient Roman celebration of Hilaria. April
Fool's Day spread throughout Britain during the eighteenth century. In Scotland,

(21:31):
the tradition became a two day event, starting with quote
hunting the gouk that's a word gowk gouk is a
term for a type of bird, but it's also slang
for a fool on this day pranking. Scot's send unsuspecting
Gouq's the people, not the birds on fool's errands just

(21:53):
to waste their time, And if you don't get gouchd,
there's always an opportunity for humiliation the very next day,
which is Tallly Day. Tallly Day is for largely harmless
Darriere related pranks aka pranks involving your butt, such as
pinning fake tales on someone or sticking Kickney signs on them.

(22:14):
April first in Poland goes about it the same as
any other pro April Fool's place. It's called Prima aprilis.
There is a funny parting phrase for prankers, though that
I thought was worth mentioning, which is Prima aprilis April
Fool's Day, be careful, you can be wrong, which is
truly like advice to take throughout the entire year. But

(22:36):
what about what we've come to know as the typical
April Fool's Day pranks. It's not especially surprising that capitalism
took like a fun little day like April Fool's Day
and ran with it because, as we know, we live
in hell. But in modern times, people have gone to
great lengths to create elaborate April fools Day hoaxes. Newspapers,
radio and TV stations, and websites have participated in the

(22:59):
April First tradition of reporting outrageous fictional claims that have
fooled their audiences. A few examples. In nineteen fifty seven,
the BBC reported that Swiss farmers were experiencing a record
spaghetti crop and showed footage of people harvesting noodles from trees.
In nineteen eighty five, Sports Illustrated writer George Plimpton tricked

(23:23):
many readers when he ran a made up article about
a rookie picture named Sid Finch who could throw a
fastball over one hundred and sixty eight miles per hour.
In nineteen ninety two, National Public Radio ran a spot
with former President Richard Nixon saying that he was running
for president again, Only it was an actor, not Nixon,

(23:44):
and this segment was all in April Fool's Day prank
that caught the country by surprise. In nineteen ninety six,
Taco Bell duped people when it announced that it agreed
to purchase Philadelphia's Liberty Bell and intended to rename it
the Taco Liberty Bell. In nineteen ninety eight, after Burger
King advertised a quote left handed whopper, scores of clueless

(24:06):
customers requested this fake sandwich and then Google also notoriously
hosts an annual April fools Day prank that has included
everything from a telepathic search to the ability to play
pac Man on Google Maps. This is a sentence that
made me laugh from History dot Com. For the average trickster,
there is always the classic April fools Day prank of

(24:29):
covering the toilet seat with plastic wrap or swapping the
contents of sugar and salt containers. I'm sorry I had
to mention that, because like the sugar and salt is
very innocent, But I for one have never heard of
covering the toilet and plastic wrap. That seems cruel and
crazy in History dot com.

Speaker 4 (24:46):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (24:48):
Anyway, Impressively, the joke of April Fool's Day has endured
for centuries, and at this point to have my life
contribute any part to this joke is an honor. Actually,
I live for bits in April Fool's Day is basically
the longest running bit of all time. So it was

(25:09):
only right that I was born today and that, my friends,
is our episode today. I hope you had fun. Now
I'm gonna go do something for my birthday, even though
this is the past, but today is my birthday and
I'm doing something now for you. Anyway, that's it.

Speaker 4 (25:25):
Bye, Welcome to Jack it Apping here a podcast about
things falling apart and putting it back together again. We're
going fasten this intro because we have a lot of

(25:47):
stuff to get to and the thing that we have
a lot of stuff to get to about is the
election for candidates for the Council of Presidents for National
Nurses United. And in order to talk about that, and
we're talking about that, I you know, okay, I shoul
I should should have ran this one through in my
head before we started this. But yeah, I'm here today

(26:09):
with John Jahad and Rosa to talk about Yeah, there's
slate movement thing I don't know called shift Change and
why they're running, how they met, et cetera, et cetera,
and yeah, some other stuff about the union. So all
three of you, welcome to the show.

Speaker 6 (26:27):
Thank you, thank you, thank you for having us.

Speaker 4 (26:31):
Yeah, so I guess the place we should start for
this for so we we talked to shift Change last year,
but I think for people who don't remember that or
you know, I mean, it's been God, I don't know,
I don't know how long I've lost track of time.
Can you explain a bit about what you're running for,
and I mean specifically what it is, sort of how

(26:53):
it works.

Speaker 7 (26:54):
I'll just start real quick, like in cases it's not clear.
We're all members of a large national nurses union called
National Nurses United, and so we're from individual parts of
that union, which is kind of an umbrella over California
Nurses Association and National Nurses Organizing Committee, which I'm a
part of, Brazil as a part of Minnesota Nurses Association,

(27:17):
which jahead, is a part of NAISNA, which is New
York State nurs Association, which Sanya Green is a part of.
And then we also have Michigan Nurses Association and the
DC Nurses Association and our group shift Change is like
a caucus, which is like whenever workers instead of a
union get together because they want to change how the
union works. And we're running what's something called a slate

(27:40):
where we have to have groups of people running together
for specific union offices, and so we have a lot
of people running not just US three or US four
for the Council presidents, but we also have Canadas running
for the Board of Vice presidents and also delegates for
our convention. And hopefully that's a good basis for this

(28:00):
starting off the conversation.

Speaker 4 (28:02):
Yeah, so, I guess the first question I wanted to ask,
because I think this is an interesting story is how
did how did you meet? Because this is a mostly
a very different group of people from last time.

Speaker 6 (28:16):
How did we meet?

Speaker 4 (28:17):
Oh?

Speaker 6 (28:17):
My, that is a good story.

Speaker 8 (28:19):
So if you're not aware, or if you've been living
under a rock, you know there's there's a lot of
violence that's happening in the world, and specifically there's violence
that's happening in Palestine. And John, I and Jahad all
met as nurses who were looking to really be involved

(28:42):
in Palestine solidarity.

Speaker 6 (28:45):
Work, and so we met on a space.

Speaker 8 (28:48):
We connected there and you know, our politics pretty much
aligned that.

Speaker 6 (28:53):
We believe that oppressed people should be liberated.

Speaker 8 (28:56):
And that was one of the largest ways that we
met each other and we became I mean, I feel
like Jahad and John are part of my family. Definitely,
we have really connected on the solidarity front for that,
but also as nurses organizing and really seeing where the
false law fault lines are within our own union.

Speaker 4 (29:19):
We haven't talked about specifically the nurses organizing has been
going on for Palestine and solidarity stuff on the show before.
It's really interesting.

Speaker 9 (29:30):
Even though we haven't met in person yet. We're looking
forward to meeting in April at the Labor Notes conference.
But despite the fact that we haven't met in person,
there is a lot of chemistry among the group and
we have a lot of you know, similar visions, and
especially when it came to organizing for Palestine. So I

(29:52):
joined Resita and John and others and Nurses for Palestine
chat group and that group is active in highlighting the
suffering of the Palestinian people and the politics behind it
and how nurses can be in the front lines not
only to take care of patients, but also for other

(30:13):
healthcare workers around the world. And that's a huge part
of this because this genocide that's going on has claimed
the lives of so many innocent civilians as well as
physicians and nurses and other healthcare workers, medics, etc. From
that big group, or almost you can call it national.

(30:37):
There are smaller chapters now in different cities. There's healthcare
Workers for Palestine twin cities where I am from, and
Chicago and San Francisco, and there's in Seattle and Boston.
There's a lot of movement among healthcare workers where they
focus their attention that hospitals, health care facilities, healthcare professionals

(31:01):
are not a target during a military conflict and all
the war crimes that have been committed need to be
answered for. So from that we kind of sprouted a
smaller group, and with the election coming up for the
National Nurses United, we thought we could take that more
of a like a grassroots movement to make a bigger change,

(31:24):
because we believe, you know, all these smaller changes in
the base should lead to a bigger change at the top,
and unions are the perfect example where we can affect
change and you know, have the politicians and all the
people up in the highest echelon powers if you will

(31:46):
listen and do what actually the base needs. And you know,
there's no better way of doing it but having your
own union representing what the nurses in the union want
and their policies and statements should reflect what the nurses need,

(32:08):
and that's what we're here, and that's why we call
ourselves Shift Change.

Speaker 7 (32:12):
One thing I wanted to add on to that is that,
like when we first all came together, there was a
call from palsening trade unions to push our own trade
unions here in the US, which have historically not really
taken strong positions on things like international conflicts or you
know what's going on in Palestine in particular. And our

(32:34):
union just adopted BDS language within the last year, the
California nurs Association National Nurses Organizing Committee, and that took
an extraordinary amount of pressure from rank and file nurses
to get the leadership to agree that this was an
important stance. We noticed that unions had just gone through
democratic reform processes who have been taken over by rank

(32:57):
and file workers. UA with Sean Fayn had adopted much
more like much quickly, much more quickly resolutions in favor
of peace and ceasefire. And you know, as workers were
like against war of all kinds. And but in particular
this is like a particularly egregious situation where nurses have

(33:22):
borne the brunts of like all the healthcare workers who
are being targeted specifically, and palisfied in Gaza, the majority
of those of those healthcare workers are nurses, so we
believe there's a direct connection between you know, our work
here and the support of those nurses over there. And
I guess then going from that to leaning towards how

(33:45):
our building a democratic rank and file union. Not only
will it enact these be a way for us to
enact the kind of positive policy changes we want, but
it'll build a stronger union for everybody that we can
fight the bosses at the bedside making sure that our
patients are taking care of our communities. So I'll let it.

Speaker 1 (34:08):
Go, you know.

Speaker 4 (34:09):
So that's a bit of a segue into the next
thing I wanted to ask about, which was, Okay, so
you've talked about sort of you've talked about how you
all met through like Palcini salid Are you're organizing how
that's one of the important things for why y'all are
doing this. But I wanted to say, yeah, so if
you can go into more detail about the specific things

(34:29):
that brought you to running for this.

Speaker 7 (34:34):
Rosita, why don't you give a little bit of an
account of your story of how you first heard about
shift changes like, I think, because I think that's kind
of that I think that would be fun.

Speaker 8 (34:44):
So I first heard of Shift Changed last year, and
you know, I was very apprehensive.

Speaker 6 (34:52):
I was like, oh, wow, who's this new group that's
coming in?

Speaker 8 (34:54):
And you know, I kept I was hearing from my
very own union that you know, there was a group
out there that was challenging and that maybe had gotten
some things wrong, and you know, they just you know,
needed to kind of be put aside. And so I
did join one of the calls. There was an outreach
call to kind of figure out whose shift Change is,

(35:16):
and I thought it was pretty interesting. I thought, you know,
here are some very motivated union members who see that
there's something that needs to change within our union, which
is part of what we do as organizers. We see
that there may be something that needs to change even
within our own union, and we as rank and file,
or we as union members should be able to have

(35:38):
that voice to change it. And what I was seeing
was that their voice was being really suppressed. Instead of saying, hey,
how can we move towards what you're asking and really
come to a place where we can understand where you're
coming from. Instead it was no We're not going to
listen to their voices. We're not going to you know,
even engage with this group. They're this rogue group out

(36:00):
there that's like, you know, causing all this ruckus, which
makes me, you know, I'm somebody who loves and gravitates
towards ruckus.

Speaker 6 (36:09):
That's just my personality. So it just made me more curious.

Speaker 8 (36:12):
And then, you know, when we started organizing for you know,
the Palestine Solidarity, John came in and I was like,
oh wait, I think I know this guy, like, you know,
he's one of those shift change guys.

Speaker 6 (36:27):
And it just made me more curious.

Speaker 8 (36:28):
And you know, we've had great conversations and I really
really understand, you know, the motivation, and because of some
things that have happened to me within our union that
has made me really recognize there are ways that we
can make positive changes for our union, and as organizers,
as nurses, we have to strive for those and we

(36:51):
have to have the ability to have our voices heard
and to motivate each other to make those changes.

Speaker 6 (36:57):
Because if we.

Speaker 8 (36:58):
Are the union, then we should be able to change
our union towards what we want to see out of
our union.

Speaker 6 (37:05):
And that's probably the most important thing.

Speaker 7 (37:08):
I was gonna say, jahead, do you want to talk
a little bit about your experience with the Minnesota Nurse
Association strike in twenty twenty two and then watching the
Nurses Forward people, because I think that kind of ties in.

Speaker 4 (37:22):
Well, sorry, before we do that, we have to do
an ad break before. I'm also gonna get yelled at
my bosses at break ay, ads, all right, we're back,

(37:43):
We're back from ads hell.

Speaker 1 (37:44):
Yeah, let's do this.

Speaker 9 (37:46):
I thought my two cents would be a good fit
after what Rusida just said. Everybody has their own unique
experience and how they became interested. I'm a member of
Minnesota Nurses Association and we went to unstrike two years
ago to request and demand better contract with the Fairview

(38:10):
system here in the Twin Cities area. Eventually there was
a contract that it was ratified. After that there was
an election. And even though I'm a member, an active member,
I serve on some committees with M and A, and
recently I joined the Government Affairs Committee. You know, having

(38:33):
been really engaged in the politics of the union until
a new slate another troublemakers, if you will, another group
of troublemakers, you know, who call themselves Nurse Nurses Forward.
They ran against the current board and actually they won.
They won a landslide last November, and that was a

(38:56):
huge change and an inspiration for me. Really rank and
file nurses and they're all, you know, nurses working the
on the floors, and I know some of them personally,
and I trusted these guys knew what they're talking about,
and they they were running on a platform that made
sense where all the rank and file nurses have a

(39:17):
say and they are well informed because there's a lot
of stuff that goes behind doors that nurses are not
brevy to and that, you know, makes things sound a
little shady sometimes where you know, unions are, say, endorsing
a politician and this politician kind of drops the ball

(39:39):
or does something that's not in the interest of the union,
and yet they're still supporting them. We need to know
why and how that came to be. So that kind
of gave me an inspiration and the moment John came
and recruited me, if you will, and I thought, sure,
you know, if we if we can do affects some

(40:01):
change in the local level, I think it's time to
change at the national level. So we're hoping for the
best here and we're trying to do our best to
get a good result.

Speaker 4 (40:12):
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I mean
that was some thing I remember from last time. Is
this this issue of transparency in this issue of the
union acting. I don't know if autonomously is the right word,
but the union acting just sort of doing stuff that
members were just like finding out about afterwards. Yeah, and

(40:35):
you know, I don't know, I think like that's on
a kind of basic I mean, there's obviously a political
level to it, but on just the sort of basic
what is a union level, you would think that the
union wouldn't be doing that, and yet Comma, I was just.

Speaker 6 (40:51):
Going to comment on that.

Speaker 8 (40:53):
I think one of the biggest parallels that I've been
able to see is, you know, we spend a lot
of time of our as nurses fighting against the hospital industry.
Right it's the big Boss, as we call it. You know,
we march on the Boss, or you know, we have
you know, rallies around it, or we do petitions, and
you know, we're constantly fighting this big entity of the
hospital industry, which oftentimes keeps us in the dark about

(41:17):
policies or about changes that they're making or you know,
various things, and I can't help but to see the
parallels between our fight with the hospital industry and then
comes our.

Speaker 6 (41:29):
Fight with our own union.

Speaker 8 (41:31):
So you know, how can we within our union change
that so that we're not seeing both entities as the same.
I don't want to be in a union that I
also am feeling is the same entity that we are
fighting a bedside. So that transparency for us is extremely important.

(41:53):
That autonomy, that accountability is extremely important, because why should
we be having two parallel fights with our own union
and with the hospital industry.

Speaker 7 (42:03):
I was just going to say, like that the that's
what the what inspired us the first time around was
that it felt like we were struggling both against Like
you've got to fight against management. Why do I have
to also at the same time turn around and fight
like with union staff about basic stuff. That's like all
they have to do is like nurses are really smart.

(42:25):
I know, it's hard, Like it's a shocking idea that
nurses might know a thing or two and the idea
that we that they have to come up and focus
group amongst themselves to tell us what our values are.

Speaker 1 (42:37):
Right, Like I think I.

Speaker 7 (42:39):
Can walk around my unit and I can tell I
can find out what nurses values are real fast. I mean,
we may not all agree on every single thing, right,
there's a there's a pretty wide amount of ideological like
alignment in our union. We're not all we're not all
in locks up about everything except for how important it
is that nurses are actually leading and driving how the

(43:03):
union works. And so we have you know, the main
core thing. And I think this is what's so important
about union organizing in particular, is that you can set
aside disagreements on one thing and you focus on the
thing that's the that's your can your shared material interest
regardless because we all do the same kind of work.

(43:24):
It's really important.

Speaker 4 (43:27):
Yeah, And that's and that. Yeah, but that also makes
it doubly important that the institution that you're using to
do this is actually doing the things you wanted to
do when not fighting you at every step. One of
the things that you mentioned we were talking about this
was how this kind of stuff in the union was
impacting Powsinian solidarity organizing. I was wondering if you could

(43:48):
talk a bit about that.

Speaker 8 (43:52):
Oh, I can, I can take that and then and
Johad can actually add into it.

Speaker 6 (43:59):
But so I was part of Social Justice Committee.

Speaker 8 (44:03):
I was actually the chair for the entire California for
n and U. And one of the biggest things is,
you know, of course we're speaking out for our communities,
we're speaking out for oppression, against oppression, and specifically for
marginalized communities. So I thought it would be pretty easy
for us to align ourselves with our resolutions that we

(44:24):
had just passed. And actually October the eighth of twenty
twenty three, and I.

Speaker 6 (44:32):
Ran across a lot of barriers.

Speaker 8 (44:35):
I wanted our union, my union, to put out a
statement about a ceasefire, and to put out a statement
about how bombing hospitals and killing our healthcare worker colleagues
was wrong. And I was constantly, you know, barriers were
put up. I was told I could not throw, I

(44:55):
could not do a vigil, I could not initiate, that
I could not to speak on behalf of me being
a nurse, and so that infuriated me. I felt really
really betrayed by my union that we had just signed
all these resolutions specifically talking about aggression, talking about aparthei,

(45:17):
and yet I was being told that I could not
speak up and then I was ghosted on a few times.
I would start sending emails. I was like, hey, what's
you know going on? How come I can't do this?
And there would be no answer. Or I would say, hey,
I want to do a vigil. Nope, you can't do
a vigil. Nope, there's no signs that you can use. Nope, nope, no.
And so I just kept getting all these no answers,
and a few of us got together, we got a

(45:37):
petition going, and we sent it in. We're like, hey, look,
these are all the reasons why we as nurses feel
that we should be speaking out against what's happening right now.

Speaker 6 (45:46):
And this is even in the early times.

Speaker 8 (45:48):
Even you know, really in you know, the end of October,
beginning of the next month, and you know, it took
them a long time to get it out, and it
was a very middle of the road statement. At that time,
I had asked the Union to sign on and endorse
one of the largest and one of the first union
rallies in support of Palestine that had been called by

(46:10):
the Palestinian trade unions specifically for us to rally around,
and they refused, And on that morning I submitted publicly
my resignation to the Racial Social Justice Committee. I felt
that it was an absolute dishonor for me to sit
in that position and to be the face of a

(46:31):
committee that says it stands for social justice and yet
was putting up barriers for us to speak out as nurses.

Speaker 6 (46:38):
And that really was a huge deal for me.

Speaker 8 (46:42):
It was a huge deal for many other people that
saw that as a gesture of solidarity.

Speaker 6 (46:49):
But it was more.

Speaker 8 (46:50):
It was about my ethics and it was about my
moral standing. I could not legitimately sit in that position
while my union was stifling and censoring my voice.

Speaker 4 (47:12):
It's a brief thing that you'd take a stand like that,
and it's also it's the right thing to do, and
you should never have had to do this in the
first place, like Jesus Christ. Oh, I don't know, I mean,
I don't know. It's just deeply and incredibly frustrating, like
just hearing hearing that and watching them just like ignore,

(47:36):
ignore the things that they ignore, the resolutions that they
just passed, and I don't know, that's absolutely terrible. I
hope they lose hipocrisy much. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (47:49):
Yeah, Well, if I may add to what Rosita has
just said, First of all I have to say, Rosita
is the bravest person I know, and what her positions
and her ethics are of the highest caliber. So I'm
honored to be running with her during this time. You know,
from example here in Minnesota, you know nurses as part

(48:13):
of the government Affairs committee I was involved in. I
came kind of toward the end, so I can't take
credit for it, but it was the keeping nurses at
the bedside bill. It was. It was adopted, was passed
the House. Now in Minnesota we have all three branches
basically in the hands of Democrats. It passed the House

(48:35):
and the Senate, and yet the governor vetoed it. Why
because there was pressure from corporate you know, the big
wigs told him, if you do it, we're gonna pull
some investment or something, or I don't know, maybe we
won't have you on the board after you retire, something
like that. So I don't know, but that kind of

(48:57):
triggered us. It was really stabbing the back, if you will.
But it's still you know, the union itself could do better.
It can be more sensitive to its members' needs and
their demands. For example, we were trying to get a
resolution or a statement it was back in October about

(49:18):
a ceasefire here through the union, even though it's I
would say, inconsequential for them to say, but they even
refused to hear the suggestion or the movement to issue
a statement that was the old board. Towards the end
of the of the reign of the old board, there

(49:39):
was more effort. I think it was mid December and
a week really watered down resolution was adopted calling few
seas fire the new board team and the first or
second meeting in January. In February there was a much
more robust resolution that was adapted at a much higher

(50:02):
you know, NAIs against versus yes versus names in that
there was no needs. Actually there were some abstentions like
three out of fourteen, so you know there is a movement.
There's a grassroots rank and file nurses who are pushing

(50:23):
towards change the same thing. I'm also not only a nurse,
but also a nursing faculty at Minnesota State University in Makato,
and I belong to another union, the faculty Union. In
the very beginning, there was just kind of deafening silence.
Nobody wants to hear anything. It reminded me of the

(50:43):
period after nine to eleven. If you speak anything against
the government or anything real critique what the government did
or didn't do, you are on the other side. You know,
remember that if you're not with us, you are against
us argument, and it's the same thing.

Speaker 5 (51:00):
It was the same thing here.

Speaker 9 (51:02):
I know people who lost their jobs because they were
speaking out for Palestine or against the atrocities that these
radis were committing. And that's from within unions and healthcare organizations.
People who lost their livelihoods because of it, and they
are labeled as anti Semitic or anything like that. So
they were trying to kind of silence people, scare them

(51:23):
with all these labels and you know, illegitimate ways of
really conducting a civil discourse or having someone hear a
different point of view. So, you know, from that sprouted
this huge movement among nurses and healthcare professionals that we

(51:44):
want this to go wider, even at the national level
during the primaries, where a lot of organizing was happening
for you know, uncommitted votes for the primaries for Joe Biden,
and that made them feel uh, you know, the pressure
and as you can see, the US vetoed a ceasefire

(52:05):
resolution I think three times before, and yet this week
they allowed one to pass because there is a lot
of political pressure because they are they are doing their
own calculation, I understand, but it's still there is a
grassroot movement that affects this change.

Speaker 7 (52:21):
I just want to tie in, like everything that we're
saying around organizing, because I think so much a lot
of people come to unions with the idea that this
is how they you know, you get a chance to
build a platform to make a case for the right policies, right,
and we you know, we push things through legislation and

(52:43):
lobbying and then for some reason, like a governor decides
that they're not going to pass it. You know, our union,
like my part of the union, California Association National Nurses
Organizing Committee, this is redda's Part two was at one
point powerful, like was so organized and so powerful that
they forced the state of California, which is one of

(53:05):
the largest economies in the world, to pass a ratio
bill that was you know that the Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor,
after what was passed that you know, those little nurses.
I can't believe we're letting them do this. You know,
our union at one point was powerful enough to help
end Arnold Schwarzenegger's political career. And so when we talk

(53:26):
about getting things passed, it requires a lot of power,
and a lot of people don't understand the power means
getting people together to commit to take collective action. That
might mean occupying a capital, that might mean doing things
that are a little bit outside the law right, but
we understand that if we don't have the power, then

(53:48):
none of these you know, ideal, idealistic things that we
want to have see change in the world or happened
in the world can happen. And we've seen when we're
talking about this idea. If you're either with it's against
us or against us people who are advocating for building
that power, and that power comes through defending our contracts,

(54:08):
defending our coworkers to grieve inspits, making sure that we
are taking aggressive like action when it comes to strikes,
and getting a strong contract language. In the first place.
People who are advocating for that are being labeled like
the enemy inside a union. It's very difficult when you
put so much of your time and energy into union work,

(54:30):
which anyone who's a committed unionist can tell you of
all the countless amounts of their free time that they
spend away from their family, away from their friends, away
from their kids, doing the work of making sure that
the union is strong. To be kind of accused of
being not on the team right, or not being for
everyone else, not being a team player, when you're always committed,

(54:54):
you know, to building the power of the team. I mean,
this is why we're running is because those of us
who are making the case that we need to be
an organized union. We need a union full of people
who know how to how to fight, how to push back,
how to stand up for those of us who might
be weaker than others. To be labeled troublemakers or pains

(55:17):
in the ads, or they even call us anti union
or union busting, which is really just it hurts, right,
It's very stressful, but it's worth it to us because
our principles and our commitment to our coworkers and building
a workplace that's a just place, a place that takes
care of all the people in our communities, people who

(55:38):
would otherwise be denied the care that they deserve. We
know that we can only do that by being organized,
building relationships and taking action together as a union to fight.
And we know what that looks like. We have members
of Shift Change who have been there when they've been
occupying capital buildings, running politicians out of office. I want

(56:00):
our union to be I tell everybody this. I want
our union to be strong and powerful, and I want
it to be frightening to people who stand in the
way of nurses and our patients. And this is all connected.
You know what we see, you know our government willing
to let happen to people halfway across the world. I
always tell people my coworkers, you know what we let

(56:21):
our bosses get away with the least of us, it'll
do to any of us if they had the chance.
And so all of us come from the point of
view that we have to build our power. That power
has to be you know, honed through our fights at
our work, making sure.

Speaker 5 (56:38):
That our.

Speaker 7 (56:40):
Working conditions are good, because we know when nurses have
good working conditions, patients get the care they need. And
when we're powerful and strong at the bedside, we can
be powerful and strong out in the community where we
need to take our fights. When we want to make
the world a better place for everybody. You know, I
don't think there's any coincidence that you know, Razita is,

(57:00):
you know, an indigenous woman. Her family's from refugees from
American foreign policy broad she had learned to be a
nurse in Gaza. Zenia's family it's from the Dominican Republic.
Her family like fled like a US back dictator there, Trahiro,
And I don't think that there's any to me, there's no,

(57:23):
it's not a coincidence that we're all here doing this
work of building the kind of powerful union that we
know that all of our coworkers deserve, that our communities deserve,
the whole world deserves.

Speaker 6 (57:36):
Four troublemakers.

Speaker 7 (57:38):
Oh yeah, someone, someone smarter than me, once said this one.

Speaker 9 (57:45):
Didn't someone say once that they've been called MAGA supporters
or something.

Speaker 7 (57:51):
They were telling everybody that we were, uh, you know, weird,
right wing, trumpy people. And I think that anyone who
knows any of us but know that that is this
the truth.

Speaker 1 (58:07):
But it is what it is.

Speaker 7 (58:09):
You know, the people will say whatever they have to
say to scare people away from us, because that's easier
than doing the right thing, which is to make sure
that our union is a bottom up movement led by nurses.
They're very afraid of us doing getting our stuff together
because there's you know, there's always it's easier to get

(58:32):
along with the boss and it is to get along
with your coworkers sometimes. I think anyone will tell you
that as long as that we all know people who
are friends with the boss, because that's an easy thing
to be. It's hard to stick up for people who
otherwise can't stick up for themselves.

Speaker 6 (58:46):
Just in the in the you know, for our elections.

Speaker 8 (58:49):
So the fact that we're even running our union doesn't
want everyone to know about elections, and the way that
it's kind of we just give you the list that
we're going to endorse, just vote for them, and no
questions asked. That that's just how it should be. So
the fact that, you know, there's not a lot of
information about the elections that go on in the N

(59:09):
and U. What does it mean? What does it mean
to be in, you know, in a Council of Presidents?
What does it even mean to be a delegate? We
are often spoon fed the delegate position, just be a
delegate and then not told exactly what that means. What
does that mean for us? What does that mean in
our resolutions? What does that mean when we go to convention?

(59:30):
Those things should not be a mystery to us. We
shouldn't have to poke in prod to get that information
about elections, and so that's also one of the things
that we're trying to highlight as well. We should be
very informed. And I think that's also another parallel between
our US government who chooses you know, they kind of
sometimes expect us not to go to the polls because

(59:52):
it works in their favor, to not be informed voters
because it works in their favor. So we can kind
of see that same parallel, and that's one of the
things that you know, I think John has made a
great way of highlighting that and has really essentially, you know,
paved the way for making that information known as well
as Zenya Zenia is. Can I say this, she's a

(01:00:14):
full badass because she she her and John, like I
have to say, like, they are so on it of
getting that information out, and it's extremely important because we
want our nurses to be informed, we want all of
us to be informed.

Speaker 4 (01:00:29):
Yeah. So on that note, when is the election and
if you're in the Union, how do you vote?

Speaker 7 (01:00:35):
Ballots go out April fifth, we have to have you
have to have your ballot in Oakland in the office
by May. We're telling people May seventeenth, because they're going
to be counted the morning of May eighteenth. You will
get if you are a member, a duce paying member
in good standing, you will get a ballot in the mail.

(01:00:58):
But we are also telling people because we are finding
that there's kind of like two lists of people, you know,
in particularly our VA nurses. VA nurses are telling us
that they have not been getting bad they didn't get
ballots last election, and so we're encouraging everyone to send
emails to the election officers to get a ballot if

(01:01:20):
you haven't gotten one, to make sure that those lists.
There's a list of people paying dues and they faithfully
take your dues out of your out of your check,
and then there's a list of people who receive ballots.
You know, definitely very normal and cool, the sort of
thing that we expect from any sort of union, that is,
you know, buying for the nurses. And so we have

(01:01:43):
an election email. Can I does anyone have that off
top of their heads? I will pull it up real
quick as we were talking.

Speaker 4 (01:01:51):
That's fine, we'll just we'll just show notes.

Speaker 1 (01:01:53):
Yes, yeah, it will be in the description.

Speaker 9 (01:01:56):
And in the meantime, you know, people can go to
our website. We have a website where you can read
about our story, our philosophy, our platform, you know, all
the things that people should know and how to request
the ballot and how to email the union and everything.
The address is shift change and you one word dot org.

Speaker 4 (01:02:20):
Awesome. Yeah, thank you, thank you three so much for
coming on the show. And hope, hope you beat them.

Speaker 7 (01:02:28):
I'm looking forward to us having a vigor where we can.

Speaker 4 (01:02:33):
Yeah, I'm excited.

Speaker 6 (01:02:35):
Thank you, thank you for having us think you appreciate it.

Speaker 4 (01:02:40):
Yeah, and the cerpanicett appened here you too, also listen,
dear listener, can go make trouble for your bosses, your
political leaders and people in your union if they're not
doing what you wanted to do.

Speaker 9 (01:02:53):
Hell yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 10 (01:03:08):
Hello, and welcome to it could happen here. A podcast
about things falling apart and how we try to put
things back together again. It's sort of the Humpty Dumpty
of podcasts. And of course, all the King's horses and
all the kings men can't put us back together again
because the attendance of power will never solve our problems
for us. It's up to us to collectively solve our
own problems. I'm your guest host with all the dramatic metaphors,

(01:03:33):
Margaret Gildoy. Today it's one of those things falling apart episodes.
Today we're going to be talking about the Kinsey Institute
for Research and Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, a research institute
in Bloomington, Indiana. Its mission is to quote foster and
promote a greater understanding of human sexuality and relationships to research, outreach, education,

(01:03:55):
and historical preservation. The Kinsey Institute in many ways is
just a sexual research center. It's the sexual research Center.
We're going to be talking to Dev Montonez, who last
week gave me a tour of the center. But first
being me, I want to give you all context. I'm
going to talk about history. I'm going to talk about

(01:04:17):
a different institute for sexual research called well, the Institute
for Sexual Research, except it was in Berlin from nineteen
nineteen to nineteen thirty three, so they called it the
Institute for Sexual Wiston Shaft History sometimes remembers it as
Hirschfeld's Institute after Magnus Hirschfeld, the director of it. For

(01:04:38):
fourteen years, the institute researched human sexuality. They offered consulting
on matters of sex to straight and gay people. They
pioneered a ton of transsexual medical practices, including pushing for
the shocking at the time idea that trans people are
happier if we're just allowed to socially transition and live
as our preferred gender, which they observed led to a

(01:05:01):
dramatic drop in suicide rates. This is medical practice that
has continued, and we have more and more research about
that to this day. The institute coined the terms transvestite
and transsexual. They performed the first gender confirmation surgery in
known history on a woman named Dora Richter in nineteen thirty.

(01:05:22):
They worked alongside pro homosexual advocacy groups. Germany led the
Western world in acceptance of LGBT folks in the nineteen
twenties and early nineteen thirties. It was founded by three
Jewish researchers, the most famous of whom is the director,
Magnus Hirschfeld. The institute itself, however, is famous today for

(01:05:45):
one thing. Imagine a picture of a book burning. The
first picture that comes to your mind is probably black
and white, and it's of Nazis. This photo is used
any time someone wants to say something like the are
bad they burned books. What usually goes on said when
this photo is reproduced is what books those Nazis were burning.

(01:06:10):
They were burning the institute on May sixth, nineteen thirty three,
Nazis burned around twenty thousand books, destroying endless amounts of
research into homosexuality, transsexuality, and cross dressing. Joseph Goebbels, the
chief propagandist of the Nazis, was present. He gave a
speech to forty thousand people during that book burning, so

(01:06:32):
ended the Institute for Sexual Research. The first trans woman
to undergo gender confirmation surgery, Dora Richter. She was either
killed in this attack or she was arrested and died
in prison shortly thereafter. Her exact fate is unknown. Magnus
himself was out of the country at the time, and
he never returned. He died in exile in France. This,

(01:06:57):
I believe, is the context we need to hold onto
when we talk about the Kinsey Institute, when we talk
about what they're facing today, as we watch people running
for office in this country. Wielding flamethrowers to burn books
and campaign ads, while librarians face criminal penalties for making
books available to students. Eventually, the Nazis were defeated, of course,

(01:07:17):
they were defeated through force of arms, after great loss
of life and a coming together of ideological enemies like
capitalists and authoritarian communists. Shortly thereafter, in nineteen forty seven,
a bisexual, polyamorous sexologist named Alfred Charles Kinsey founded his
own Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana,

(01:07:40):
seventy seven years ago for those keeping track. Thereafter, he
produced work that's foundational to modern sexology. Most famous today
is the Kinsey Scale, which broke homosexuality and heterosexuality out
of a binary. Maybe the most famous at the time
of his work, though, was his nineteen forty eight book
Sexual Behavior and the Human in his later book Sexual

(01:08:02):
Behavior in the Human Female, which are often called the
Kinsey Reports, which offered groundbreaking analysis like it turns out
women and joy sex also, and also that thirty seven
percent of men had had quote overt homosexual experience to orgasm,
which shocked the hell out of the world. Well, it

(01:08:23):
probably shocked about sixty seven percent of the world. Since then,
the Kinsey Institute has been one of the premier sexology
research institutes and archives in the world, and now in
the twenty twenties, it finds itself at the center of
a culture war and conservative backlash. For decades, the right
wing has tried and failed to find evidence that Kinsey

(01:08:44):
himself was a pedophile. Last February, the Republican government of
Indiana voted for House Bill one thousand and one, which
bars state money from funding the institute. To tell us
what's happened with that, what the future of the institute
it is likely to be, and how all this ties
into the culture wars that we're living through Right now,

(01:09:06):
we have Dev Montanez, the ADMIN coordinator of the institute
and a student at Indiana University. Hi, Dev, Hey, thanks
for listening to my long intro.

Speaker 5 (01:09:19):
It's good for me to know some of the history
behind the place that I'm at forty hours a week.

Speaker 10 (01:09:28):
So could you introduce yourself about a little bit about
the work that you do at the institute? And I
don't know maybe what brought you there, but just yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:09:38):
So I started back in early twenty twenty two as
kind of the person who was spearheading the seventy fifth
anniversary celebrations that we were going to have. And I
am lucky enough that I have a background in DIY
punk and so my organization skills are largely from that

(01:10:01):
and not from any type of institution. Somehow, those skills
go over really well in academia. Okay, a few of
my friends that are like postdocs and stuff that are
now in you know, academic worlds, are like, oh, yeah,
this has helped me. You know, running shows has really
helped me run research projects.

Speaker 10 (01:10:22):
Oh yeah, because it's all about having your own initiative
and working for people exactly and interesting.

Speaker 5 (01:10:28):
Yeah, it's been. It's been great to see and kind
of be in the middle of it.

Speaker 10 (01:10:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (01:10:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:10:34):
I was originally at Rutgers and then I didn't finish
my degree there, dropped out because of financial issues of course,
as that's what happens when you're in college. Yeah, and
I was in Bloomington for a long time, almost seven years,
I want to say, before I started working here. And
I started working here and I was like, well, I

(01:10:57):
get like a little bit of tuition reimbursement for working here,
I might as well finish it. So now I'm at
the purpose of or at the standstill of my life
where I am back in school and working full time. Yeah,
mainly just to get it over.

Speaker 10 (01:11:13):
With, get working full time over with.

Speaker 5 (01:11:17):
Uh No, well I wish get the degree over with that.
If I have the debt, I might as well have it.

Speaker 10 (01:11:25):
Yeah, so okay. So you work for the Kinsey Institute,
and the Kinsey Institute is totally fine and on solid
footing and is completely okay. So this is the thing
that surprised me, you know, when I came and visited
the Kinsey Institute and thank you for the tour of
the institute. I the Kinsey Institute is such a institute,

(01:11:46):
such a monolith, such a a thing that has existed
for so long. It's hard for me to imagine people
being really mad at it. Like it's it's hard for
me to imagine that it's in trouble and it seems
too big to fail. But like not too big, but
too institutional, too important, Like I can't imagine someone saying, oh,

(01:12:10):
we want to get rid of this incredibly important historical thing.
I guess that's what a lot of the culture wars
actually are about. So what's going on.

Speaker 5 (01:12:20):
Okay, So last summer it was like the budget vote
I think for Indiana government, state government, and they someone
Larisa Sweet is her name, the representative who proposed this,
basically decided to say Kensing's too is perverts and you

(01:12:47):
we shouldn't fund them with state money, which would you
know under I guess understandable. But we're not funded by
state money. Okay, only like a small person of the
university as a whole is funded by state government money.
So it's not quite like your tax dollars are paying

(01:13:09):
for us to exist. We are able to utilize the
services of the university, which is very helpful in the
case of being If we were like a nonprofit, we'd
probably have to do a lot of that work, like
legwork in terms of like up keep of a building,
like we'd have to do that on our own right.

(01:13:30):
But the university, the state government, does not fund us.
We're funded by donors. We're funded by grants that we
receive and endowments that exist that other people have given
us because they believe in the worst that we do
and they want to see it continue.

Speaker 10 (01:13:51):
So why are they trying to go after the wrong
source of your funding? And how does it end up
impacting you like that they've pas asked to this, you know,
essentially law to take money away from you that you
weren't using.

Speaker 5 (01:14:06):
Yeah. So the big thing is that there is a
lot of misinformation about Alfred Kinsey and his first book,
The Human Behavior of This or sorry, The Sexual Behavior
of the Human Male, And there is a table within
it of doctor Kinzie. When he did his research, he

(01:14:29):
interviewed people specifically to ask them, you know, when were
you first, like first realizing your sexual arousal. And some
people said, you know, I was this age, I was twelve,
I was five. And as a child, you know that
you play around with your body because you're learning it right,

(01:14:51):
because you've never used most of these things before. It's
brand new. And so he had years in their ag
in there that were younger than anyone that is conservative
would want to believe that you would be sexually.

Speaker 10 (01:15:07):
Aroused, right unless you're going to marry a heterosexually into
a pastor Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 5 (01:15:14):
Yeah, child marriage is coming back. So there's that true. Yeah,
So there's that that exists. It's a lot of people
who don't understand the research that he does. Period, there
was a lot of backlash when he had when he
did his work because people didn't want to believe that
anyone was having premarital sex, that anyone was homosexual and

(01:15:36):
it was normal, or that anyone any woman enjoys sex,
right because it's for one thing only, right.

Speaker 10 (01:15:45):
So they looked at this chart that said five year
olds experienced sexual attraction and said he's interviewing five year olds?
Is that.

Speaker 5 (01:15:57):
Basically, or rather that he was doing experiments on five
year olds. His work is like physical because he is
a zoologist, right, biologist by nature. And I'm going to
guess they think that any research that you do has
to be with a person in one room and not

(01:16:18):
you know, social interviews or oral histographies, Like they don't
put those two things together.

Speaker 10 (01:16:24):
Right, And I was reading that they have a lot
of I was expecting when when I looked at this,
I was expecting to find like op eds from the
fifties or something, But I'm finding things from twenty twenty
three of people throwing a fit about the fact that
he during some of this he did like, I mean,
he was kinky. It seemed like right, he like filmed

(01:16:44):
himself fucking, and he filmed his wife fucking and he
a bunch of consenting adults had some sex that he
was around for, and that's like meant to mean that
he is a horrible, weird monster.

Speaker 5 (01:17:00):
Yeah, and truly, none of my work has anything to
do with or literally anyone's work has anything to do
with what Kinsey might have done when she was here,
because he died so like within eight years of the
institute even being a thing.

Speaker 10 (01:17:16):
Yeah, so.

Speaker 5 (01:17:19):
I don't know, it's not important to the work that
we do now, even if he was a kinky person,
Like people that get into sex research are interested in sex,
so he wanted to try stuff out. I guess ye, Like,
who does it? That's like the point of being alive.

Speaker 10 (01:17:38):
No, no, actually, the point of being alive is buying
goods and services from our advertisers. I don't know if
you knew this. I think you thought it was about
seeking joy, but it's actually about filling the gaping mall
at the center of your life with products like these ones.

(01:18:06):
And we're back, Okay. So obviously people have a problem
with this man who's been dead since the fifties and
therefore mad at this institute that keeps track of a
lot of stuff over the years like an archive. What
do they when they try to pull state funding from you?
How does that impact you? You're saying that that's like
not you know, does it primarily impact you because everyone's

(01:18:29):
suddenly aware of and mad at you again, or does
it actually also like is it going to cut your funding?
Like what's happening.

Speaker 5 (01:18:35):
So what's happening is there's now a I don't want
to say like a disagreement, but there's there's a there's
people trying to figure out how to be compliant with
this law, which means that they need to go into
certain administrative burdens to prove that we don't get these fonts. Okay,

(01:18:59):
that's really all that it is. Otherwise we are pretty
good standing. It's it's more so at least now the
Border Trustie's voted on Friday and they basically brought in
the President's recommendation of do not separate us from the

(01:19:20):
from the university, and so that happened on Friday, March
first was the day that that went through. So we
are all feeling pretty good. We all kind of had
a little bit of a not so much a victory lap,
but like a we've been hearing this for the last

(01:19:40):
six months of worrying about what's going to happen to
this place that we all love and that carries so
many things because of the librarians who are around in
the artifice, who are around, aren't the people handling the collection,
And the legislature later decides, I you in a universe
can't hold anything that is obscene, and obscene is you know,

(01:20:06):
I have the beholder. It could easily mean that this,
like six hundred thousand artifacts that we hold in our
collections are gone, and we have stuff that spans two
thousand years. It's not just items that are around today.
And everything that we get is donated. We don't buy

(01:20:27):
any of the items. Per second. People just mail them
to us.

Speaker 10 (01:20:34):
The kind of things that normally if you mail to
someone you might get in trouble.

Speaker 5 (01:20:38):
Yes, exactly, And that was kind of the people still
think they're going to get in trouble kind of the point.
Like I've heard that people have like shipped porn in
cereal boxes as a way to like hide them because
they're still worried that the comstock law is around in
a way that will make these items be destroyed.

Speaker 10 (01:21:02):
Yeah, well, okay, oh, there's so many parts of this
that I want to talk about. I actually thought about
this because I mailed a book from the Kinsey Institute
to someone last week, and as I was packaging it up,
I was thinking to myself, this used to be a crime.
The Comstock laws. For anyone who's curious, there was this
historical pervert named Comstock, And by that I mean he

(01:21:25):
was the largest collector of porn of his era who
was on a wild crusade against perversion and birth control
and all of these things. And he went around and
stopped people. He got all these laws passed that he
can't pass pornographic materials through the US male That was
like his big contribution to society, besides ruining an awful

(01:21:47):
lot of people's lives. And that's coming up again, like
the ghost of the Comstock Laws. Do you want to
talk about that?

Speaker 5 (01:21:56):
Yeah, So we have a book. Bands happening within libraries.
I honestly am not positive what is happening within Indiana libraries.
But there is a group of I would say parent groups,
but I don't even know that they're actually still parents
of children. It's usually like women in their mid fifties

(01:22:20):
and later who are running for superintendent or the school
board whatever, and now coming up with these ways that
children can't interact with items that maybe have never been
illegal in the past, so to speak. Like if any
book mentions sex of any kind, right, it can't be around.

(01:22:45):
If anyone is homosexual in any of the books, it's
banned in their eyes. Yeah, and you know a majority
of our books are a lot of those things.

Speaker 10 (01:22:59):
I'm sure there's some straight stuff in there if you
look really hard.

Speaker 4 (01:23:03):
Well.

Speaker 5 (01:23:03):
I today I was in the reading room that we
have and we had out the It was called the
like Wild Edibles of the Eastern North America, and it
was a book written by Alfred Kinsey because he was
a he was like an eagle scout, Yeah, like loved nature.

Speaker 10 (01:23:22):
He was one of the first Eagle Scouts.

Speaker 5 (01:23:24):
Actually, yeah, you know more about them than I too.

Speaker 10 (01:23:27):
I just read about him in order to prepare this introduction.

Speaker 5 (01:23:32):
But a lot of those groups, like Moms for Liberty,
they're the ones who are like a big crusade right now.
When I first started, we just got a statue installed
behind our building of Alfred Kinsey, And that is kind
of when the majority of the threats that we would

(01:23:55):
get started Okay, when they start talking about this statue.
I have talked to people that have worked for like
twenty years and they have said they've never seen threats
come in like this ever before. Yeah, so it's people
talking about like bombing the statue. I calls about you know,
being a sexual predator, a debiant, or you know, you

(01:24:19):
guys should all die, and it's very directed at us, right,
It's it's less of being directed at like a random
abstract thing.

Speaker 4 (01:24:30):
Right.

Speaker 5 (01:24:30):
We have gotten a lot of harassment in terms of
like people who because they think, oh, you do sex research,
so you want to picture of my dick?

Speaker 10 (01:24:39):
So interesting.

Speaker 5 (01:24:40):
Yeah, so that will happen at times.

Speaker 10 (01:24:44):
You all should do an exhibit of the dick pics
that have been donated so kindly to your institution and
the individuals who work for it are are a ratiing
system underneath.

Speaker 5 (01:24:57):
I'm sure a curator, a compassman will love that. We
actually just got in donated to us was the Cynthia
plaster Casters her dick molds that she did of the
in the eighties. She's like a famous groupie, okay, like
rock stars, So we have like Jimmy Hendrick's keenis whoa,

(01:25:20):
you know, bronze mold and that's the next big exhibition
that's supposed to happen. But we also have like Jello biafra.

Speaker 1 (01:25:28):
Wow.

Speaker 5 (01:25:28):
Okay, it's hilarious.

Speaker 10 (01:25:30):
Would you all get never mind? I was thinking about
how you all can make some money.

Speaker 5 (01:25:36):
Lots of people are the gay of that.

Speaker 10 (01:25:38):
Yeah, okay, huh, well no, it's okay. So it's so
interesting to me, right, because it seems like their attempt
to shut you down legislatively was a swing and a miss.

Speaker 4 (01:25:51):
Right.

Speaker 10 (01:25:52):
It was this thing that they they thought that they
had this thing that they're like, Haha, We're going to
get those perverts by cutting off their funding. And then
everyone was like, well, that's not where the funding comes from.
And the university was like, we kind of like this place.
It's been around for seventy seven years. It's literally the
only reason anyone outside of Indiana has ever heard of us. Yeah,
is that kind.

Speaker 5 (01:26:11):
Of a that's definitely the vibe. We had like a
series of listening sessions with the higher administration of like
the public, well the university public coming in and just
basically a lot of them saying the Kinzians too, is
the only reason why I came to ium. The fact

(01:26:31):
that this is here allows me to do my research,
even if their research is in like Eastern European you know,
like faberge eggs. Right, So it gives people a chance
to see that like academic freedom and like freedom to
research what you want is possible, and not just possible,

(01:26:53):
but like encouraged. Right, Like, as an R one university,
we should be doing should be researching things that aren't
or taboo at times, yeah, and are actually trying to
help the world rather than making money for some investor somewhere.

Speaker 10 (01:27:14):
Right, No, because that seems like the entire point of academia, right. Academia. Okay,
this is really interesting to me because I have kind
of a bit of a love hate relationship with academia,
and you know, there's a lot of critiques that can
be laid at sort of Ivory tower and locking away
information and things. But yet as we enter this sort
of anti intellectual time that is absolutely a right wing

(01:27:35):
culture war thing is to be anti intellectual and in
this case specifically shut down the academy's ability to preserve
and transfer knowledge.

Speaker 5 (01:27:44):
Like.

Speaker 10 (01:27:44):
The problem from my point of view is that when
there are limits to how well the information can be transferred,
rather than the right wing anti intellectualism. Well, I anti
intellectualism broadly. I'm not trying to make a case for
any other kind of It is a problem with the
actual existence of this knowledge, right, It's this like forbidden

(01:28:07):
knowledge that no one should know that thirty seven percent
of men in the nineteen forties like got a handy,
you know exactly.

Speaker 5 (01:28:18):
The weird thing is that our collections are literally open
to anyone who wants to come. We don't need to
test it in any way. Well, yeah, that happens often,
which to me is great and is kind of hard
to come across in any archive. Usually if you have

(01:28:41):
an archive, like you need to have an affiliation with
a university or a company in order to come and
look at some of these things.

Speaker 10 (01:28:50):
Yeah, you know.

Speaker 5 (01:28:51):
I mean that's not to say that like anyone comes
in and they are doing lude things like there we
talk with everyone that comes in. There's no mystery happening.
Really okay, there's no sex dungeon. I was a little
I think, Yeah, it's really boring. It's just a beige

(01:29:15):
hallway for the most part.

Speaker 10 (01:29:17):
But you know what isn't boring that I have to
interject quickly, is supporting by like I'm never bored while
I'm in the process of exchanging little pictures of dead
people for products and services like the ones that support
this podcast. And we're back. And I feel really guilty

(01:29:48):
for literally cutting you off mid sentence in order to
do that. I'm so sorry.

Speaker 5 (01:29:51):
It's weird to be on the other side of this
to actually see do that. Yeah, one of the big
things that happened when I first started was Bloomington has
a big pride. Bloomington as a whole is what they
call like a blue pocket and the rest of the

(01:30:11):
red the sea of red of Indiana. But I've also
heard people say, like, you know, like Indiana went to
Obama in two thousand and eight, like it's not as
red as people really think it is. Right, It's that
like it just came out today that we're like the
fiftieth in voter turnout.

Speaker 10 (01:30:32):
WHOA, that's bad.

Speaker 4 (01:30:34):
That's really sad.

Speaker 5 (01:30:36):
Yeah, but people are so disheartened, Like it feels it's
really hard when these people are yelling about how conservative
Indiana is constantly that it gets in everyone's head that, oh,
it doesn't matter that what I do, which I have
a love hate Yeah, I have a love hate relationship

(01:30:56):
with voting. But I also understand that, like I kind
of need to in this capacity of where I am
right because it really can change on a dime. Right.
I think my my personal representative, he was elected by
like eleven votes and he is a horrible, horrible man.

Speaker 4 (01:31:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:31:19):
Yeah, And I when I get his fucking mailers that
just say some dumb shit about trans laws, and I
just go, I can't with this.

Speaker 10 (01:31:29):
Yeah, I get pissed because the cowboy hat and his mailers. No,
but heah, okay, yeah that makes sense. There's no cowboys
where I live. It's the mountains. Take off the cowboy
hat and put on a real tree baseball cap like
everyone else in this town. Poser, Okay, sorry anyway, h huh.

Speaker 5 (01:31:51):
So a lot of what's going on is that people
think that Indiana is super right wing, and as someone
who's who came here from the East Coast, like I
love it here, Like it's really beautiful in Indiana. Yeah,
I like not being around a lot of people. Bloomington
says that there it's a really small town, but it

(01:32:12):
really is like eighty thousand people. When the students aren't here,
which is still to me a lot of people. Yeah,
but it is small comparatively to anywhere on the East Coast, right,
But everyone I've met here, I will say, there's great
organizers that live here. There's a great amount of community
and just like building of coalitions between people that I

(01:32:37):
haven't really seen elsewhere, Okay, which is really important. And
it's not just through the university, which I think is
most people think it's all here, But there's so many
people outside of the university that do amazing work that
maybe came here to go to school but ended up

(01:32:57):
staying or just came here because this used to be
like the folk punk capital.

Speaker 11 (01:33:04):
That's true.

Speaker 10 (01:33:05):
That is whatever. When I was going to Bloomington, that
is what everyone asked. No one asked me about the
Kinsey Institute. Everyone asked me about folk punk. Yeah, my
interests align more to the Kinsey Institute.

Speaker 4 (01:33:17):
Person.

Speaker 10 (01:33:18):
No one get mad at me. Well, okay, so it's interesting.
So in my mind, you're like, oh, okay, the right
wing came for the Kinsians student and they just failed, right,
And is that missing the fact that you had a
lot of organizers and a lot of people working to
defend the Kinsey Institute.

Speaker 5 (01:33:36):
I think so, I wouldn't even say that it was
a failure. It was more of they really don't understand
what we do and even how these institutions work. I
think is the real thing is that they are so
caught up in how things should work, they don't actually

(01:33:58):
look into how like neoliberalism is everywhere and it is.
I don't think they understand what that is and how
much it's infected, how bureaucratic everything is, and how everything
is interconnected constantly.

Speaker 10 (01:34:15):
So that's why they thought tax money would be the thing,
but it's actually this complicated capitalist system.

Speaker 5 (01:34:21):
Yes, I mean maybe if they listen to some some
other people and they're about capitalism, they would probably get more,
you know, more people to come behind them. But for
the most part, the folks who are are a loud
and proud about that, they they don't know what we do.

(01:34:42):
They don't know who we are either. They think they.

Speaker 10 (01:34:44):
Do good since they're trying to murder you.

Speaker 5 (01:34:48):
Yeah, the director got docked the first year I was here.
That was fun and there was a protest with some
three percenters on campus. And we work for closely with
Blimington Pridle out of the time, and so there's always
the worry of people showing up there. Yeah, but again,

(01:35:08):
like I said, like everyone here is there's so many
good organizers that they've kept this town safe for so long,
and I think they'll continue to do that.

Speaker 10 (01:35:19):
That's cool. I like when we learn and when we
reinforce the fact that the thing that keeps us safe
is organizing and is like community organizing and getting people
together to keep track of what's going on and counter it.

Speaker 6 (01:35:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:35:35):
One of the big things that we focus on in
terms of like our research goals is well being and
that's always something that has stuck with me because to me,
the well being is us keeping each other safe. And
I remember when this all first happened. I remember talking
to the director and just being like, those people aren't

(01:35:56):
going to help us. We are going to help each other.

Speaker 1 (01:35:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:35:58):
It's like, oh, yeah, you're right, we are. It's like, yeah,
we're not. Like we kind of can't count on everyone
else sometimes these big institutions, because we know what we're doing,
but they maybe don't know what we're doing, and maybe
it's time that we just tell more people about it.

Speaker 10 (01:36:17):
I like that. I also like that it specifically points
out that they did right by hiring a diy punk
into their institution.

Speaker 5 (01:36:23):
You know, I yeah, I get a lot of weird
flat but not being an academic right, But then it
comes to things like this and it's like, oh, I
always hear like, well we made their choice, yeah, which
it's nice to feel, unfortunately in a job.

Speaker 4 (01:36:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (01:36:43):
No, that makes some sense if people want to support
you all as individuals who're facing this trouble, or the
Kinsey Institute in general, or even just like if you
have advice for people who are stuck engaging in the
culture war more directly because they don't live on the coasts,

(01:37:03):
what would you say? How can people support.

Speaker 5 (01:37:06):
To support each other? We have a nice queer sports
league here and I suggest playing kickball with your friends.
It's been really good, and also doing a honky talk night.
That's our big, our big thing cool. I'm really proud
of everyone that put has put that stuff together because
it has created a world that has brings people from

(01:37:30):
all different parts together of the town. YEA for the institute,
if you want to go to Kinseyinstitute dot org, that
is kind of where you can see everything. You can
support us by coming and learning more about sexual research
and your history, because it's all of our history in

(01:37:51):
terms of learning about how people lived and how we
have like the most mundane things. Yeah, you're talking about
Hirschfeld earlier. We have a scrap book of his and
that is like the oldest thing of his that it
is like his personal item that we have, Yeah, along

(01:38:11):
with like published items, but that's like the big thing.

Speaker 10 (01:38:15):
Yeah, he was almost fifty when he started the institute.
I think I'm like kind of doing the math in
my head really quickly because he was born in the
nineteenth century. Yeah, okay, well, thank you so much for
coming on and talking about this stuff. I'm so glad
that this didn't you know, when we first talked about this,
we didn't know which way the vote was going to go.
I'm glad to do a little bit of a celebratory

(01:38:38):
talk about this important institution. And yeah, thank you so much.

Speaker 5 (01:38:43):
Thank you.

Speaker 10 (01:38:45):
And if you want to fill hear me more, I
have a different podcast, It's Cool People Did Cool Stuff
and it's also on Cool Zone Media, which is the
thing you're listening to right now. I hope you all
are doing as well as you can with everything that's
going on and putting each other back together again because
we're all No. I'm not even going to close with

(01:39:05):
a humpty dumpty metaphor. I'm just done.

Speaker 1 (01:39:21):
Welcome, take it up here.

Speaker 12 (01:39:23):
I'm addressage of the future channel and anddeurism and haven't digging.

Speaker 1 (01:39:27):
Into political culture.

Speaker 12 (01:39:29):
Drawn from the work of Dennis Tourist and Tim world
Fourth in their book On the Edge Political Cults Left
and Right. I've spoken before about the cult recruitment process,
the contradictory positions held by cult members, ideological totalism, and
the commonalities of political cults, including rigid belief systems, immunity
to falsification, authoritarianism, arbitrary leadership, deification of leaders, intense activism,

(01:39:55):
and the use of loaded language. If you want the
details and all that, you can check out the first
episode in the Political Cult series, or you can check
out my video on the topic, or you can pick
up the book on Political Cults yourself. As I said,
on the Edge Political Cults left and Right previously, I've
touched on the Laruche movement and the United Red Army

(01:40:16):
of Japan. Today we'll be looking at another case study,
this time of the various groups associated with Fred Neumann
refused politics seamlessly with psychotherapy.

Speaker 1 (01:40:29):
Today, I'm joined by.

Speaker 4 (01:40:32):
Oh this is my cue. Oh no, I've been waiting
for my queue and I've missed it. It's me a
long misser of cues. Uh sometimes host of this podcast.
I don't this guy's name sounds really familiar, but I
cannot remember what he was up to, so I'm very excited.

Speaker 12 (01:40:48):
Yeah, yes, he has some interesting connections, very interesting connections.
If people want to learn more about him, they can,
of course pick up the book, or they can check
out Terror, Love and Brainwashing, Attachments and Culton Tutalitarian Systems
by Alexandra Stein.

Speaker 1 (01:41:05):
But anyway, let's get into it.

Speaker 12 (01:41:08):
Fred Newman was a Korean War veteran who earned a
PhD in the philosophy of science from Stanford University with
no formal training in psychology. Newman took a turn towards
Maoism in the mid nineteen sixties, as one is apt
to do in the mid nineteen sixties, in a time

(01:41:29):
when the mantra the personal is political was coming into prominence.
There was a greater interest in fusing personal development and
political action. So that era, both the new psychotherapies cateringto
a mass market that sought both happiness and social justice.
Psychotherapy became something like a secular religion, which of course
opened it up to Charlatan's who would propagate their innovative

(01:41:51):
therapies and gain a following without actually testing or thought
any scrutiny of the effectiveness of the ideas. Ieteen seventy,
Newman assembled a small collective in Manhattan, sharing an apartment
on the Upper West Side. By this time post By
this time, post the collapse to the Students for a

(01:42:12):
Democratic Society in the broader New Left, and coinciding with
the fervor of the Cultural Revolution, people were looking for
a new direction in a time when the psychotherapy bubble
was growing. Newman, as another of those charismatic therapists, would
attract a group of individuals who were yearning for hope.

(01:42:33):
New One's collective was first named if dot dot dot then,
and it was indeed a fusion of radical sixties politics
and the New Age therapy of the seventies. Newman's concept
of social therapy or crisis normalization, blurred the lines between
therapy and political activities, and the group would give rise
to the Centers for Change the CFC. By nineteen seventy three,

(01:42:57):
which proudly identified itself as a Marx Leninist Maoist organization.

Speaker 1 (01:43:02):
The communal roots of Newman's.

Speaker 12 (01:43:04):
Group had cast a cult like aura from its inception.
Core members were expected to leave their jobs, sell their possessions,
and sustain themselves through activities like fundraising on street corners,
while embracing shared living spaces within the group. Now buckle
up for a bit of a crossover episode here, because

(01:43:24):
from nineteen seventy three to nineteen seventy four Newman crossed
paths with Lyndon LaRouche. Oh God, yes, of course he did,
mind you. He links up with Laruche just after Laruche
had completed Operation mop Up, so he was just attacking
his enemies on the left and started shifting right wood

(01:43:46):
if they use those terms, and Newman is like, yeah,
this is my guy. This who I want to link
up with. So their collaboration formed the United Front, comprising
of Laruche's National Caucus of Labor Committees, the NCLC at
Newman's Center for Change, and a third group led by
Eugenio Parenti Ramos, which later transformed into the Communist Party

(01:44:11):
USA Provisional, which I have to note, I have to
know it is distinct from the Communist Party USA that
most people know about.

Speaker 4 (01:44:19):
Yeah, I think, I'm pretty sure there's another. I'm pretty
sure it's also distinct from the Communist Party USA Revolutionary
Committee and also the Communist Party USA Provisional Committee. I
think those are if I'm remembering correctly, those are all
separate organizations.

Speaker 1 (01:44:35):
Yes, yes they are.

Speaker 12 (01:44:37):
Yeah, Parentees group is actually connected with the National Labor
fred Federation. So anyway, these joint forums were established and
activities were coordinated among these groups. By nineteen seventy four,
in fact, the Center for Change disbanded and Newman and
his followers merged into the NCLC.

Speaker 1 (01:44:57):
Oh God, there was sort of a.

Speaker 12 (01:45:00):
Virgins between Larusha and Newman and their perspectives of leadership,
contre formulation, and the manipulation of membership as Larusha's apocalypse,
fair Moongarin and elitism would merge very well with Newman's
use of psychotherapy. Of course, and you learn this quickly
with cult leaders. They don't get along well for along

(01:45:20):
with other cult leaders. So the fusion with Laruge led
to inevitable clashes. While within the NCLC, the Newman group
continued its operation, and tensions eventually reached a breaking point later.

Speaker 1 (01:45:35):
In August nineteen.

Speaker 12 (01:45:36):
Seventy four, Newman and his thirty eight followers left the
NCLC to established the International Workers Party or IWP, which
he declared was the vanguard of the work in class.

Speaker 4 (01:45:50):
Oh I love the seventies.

Speaker 12 (01:45:53):
Indeed, still you know Newman's association with Laruche had a
big impact on his thinking and future developer. He aligned
with a lot of Larusi's ideologies and was just as
dismissive of various left movements. Even though they split, they
still shared a disdain for common citizens, their group's members,
and the principles of free society. Yet despite dismissing most

(01:46:16):
left movements and saying that liberalism is fascism, Newman would
occasionally dip his toes into democratic primaries infortiate existing leftist organizations,
and utilized prominent black leaders to advance his own objectives.
But I realize I haven't fully explained the focus of
Newman's ideology. In most cases, cult leaders' ideologies ultimately hinge

(01:46:39):
on follow me and the best, But you know they
have their unique quirks here on there as well.

Speaker 1 (01:46:45):
Lucky for us.

Speaker 12 (01:46:46):
Newman published a book on his ideas the same year
he parted with larushe in nineteen seventy four. So the
book was called Power and Authority, and he basically cooked
up a theory about the mind and society. They became
the gospel for his cult and the ultimate manual for
keeping his followers in check. According to Newman, revolution wasn't
just about overthrowing the bourgeoisie. You also had to overthrow

(01:47:09):
the bourgeoisie ego inside people's minds. So in a sense
we cook in, you know, because you do have to
sort of undo that brainwashing and you get.

Speaker 1 (01:47:19):
In a capitlict society.

Speaker 12 (01:47:20):
I mean, there's nothing wrong there necessarily, but you see,
he was taking cues from Marx, Lenin and LaRouche, and
his solution involved something called the proletarian psychotherapy, where the
workers of the mind took down the rulers of the
mind through therapy sessions that would attack.

Speaker 1 (01:47:37):
The bourgeois ego.

Speaker 12 (01:47:39):
Of course, he would be the one lead in the therapy,
because you know, he hated Freudian and other psychotherapies as
just boosting the bourgeois ego, and he especially hated that
regular therapy is aimed to cut the emotional umbilical cord
with the therapist and restore a healthy, independent ego, when
his social therapy meant to build up a forever dependent

(01:48:02):
proletarian ego that would only wither away when the proletarian
stayed with us away. So basically never Newman's doctrines worked
for his purposes, though his followers were stuck in this
loop of dependency for over twenty five years. He had
an additional component his control mechanisms, though. He developed a

(01:48:24):
concept called friend or sexuality. So in his organizations, casual
sexual relationships were arranged where a designated friend that you
also had sex with monitored and critiqued individuals to maintain control.
If pregnancies ever arose, they were usually told to get abortions.

(01:48:47):
And as for new And himself, his inner circle was
referred to as his haram or his wives, and they
served as both trusted lieutenants in the administration and trusted
lieutenants in the bedroom.

Speaker 1 (01:49:03):
If you dig, yes, ah, so yeah, now.

Speaker 12 (01:49:11):
Let's get into those segments that we can call Newman
and the FBI sitting in the tree kissig. Because after
the IWP was formed and briefly flirted with Marlene Dixon's
Democratic Workers' Party, which was another cult. Newman ended up
contacting the FBI. By the way, we are still in

(01:49:34):
nineteen seventy four, very eventful year. So what happened was
a guy named Jim Ratherford bailed on Newman's cult and
took the child that was probably conceived in the cult
with him. But you see, the child's mother and Green
who stayed in the cult, and she wanted her child back.

(01:49:54):
So Newman recruited two cult members that were also lawyers
to get the FBI involved in fire and then Rutherford
and the child. So they dialogued the FBI, set up
a meet in between Green and the agents, and then
Green spilled the tea that Rutherford used to roll with
the Weather Underground and also had connection to the fugitive
named Jane Albert. Fast forward to nineteen seventy six and

(01:50:15):
Newman's IWP gets exposed by a splinter group for working
with the FBI. But instead of denying it, Newman pins
the blame on Anne Green and the two lawyers and
basically pretends that they acted on their own without his direction,
because obviously the mansoni looking off himself. So that was
a fun of the side, right, well, collaboration with the FBI.

Speaker 4 (01:50:35):
Yeah, it's like, if you're gonna be a snitch, at
least have like, at least have the basic decency and
self respect to admit that you were the snitch and
not blameing on someone else.

Speaker 1 (01:50:46):
No, but a cult lead they would ever do that though.

Speaker 4 (01:50:48):
No terrible stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:51:02):
Carrying on chronologically.

Speaker 12 (01:51:03):
In nineteen seventy seven, Fred Newman shifted his focus to
the political scene of New York City's Upper West Side
and basically rebranded his group as the New York City
Unemployed and Welfare Council. At this point, he abandoned the
idea of an open vanguard formation and instead, while recruiting

(01:51:24):
through therapy, gained political influence within other groups and formed
broad and ill defined front organizations that could pursue the
cult schools without too much heat on himself personally. Newman
was actually able to get one of his cult members
elected on the local school board, and that led to
some liberals digging into Newman's background and group dynamics, where

(01:51:45):
they found that indeed he was running a therapy cult
where they relinquished jobs, severed political ties, and strendered all
property and savings.

Speaker 1 (01:51:53):
The cult.

Speaker 12 (01:51:54):
Cut off from the outside world, busy with group activities
and trapped in endless meetings, Numanites lacked feedback from reality,
which kept them in line. So Newman's electoral victory in
the form of the school board member of his own cult,
gave him a taste a little for electoral activism. So

(01:52:15):
when he crossed paths with Black nationalist Leonora Fulani, together
they formed the New Alliance Party or NAP in nineteen
seventy nine.

Speaker 1 (01:52:25):
I'll just call it the NAP, right.

Speaker 4 (01:52:27):
If I feel like we need to start like a
party counter we're at like four five already.

Speaker 12 (01:52:33):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I WP, THENAP yeah, Communist party professional yeah.
Fulani ran for lieutenant governor of New York in nineteen
eighty two and in nineteen eighty eight and ran for president,
becoming the first black woman to do so, gain in

(01:52:54):
ballot status in all fifty states and receive a nearly
one million dollars in federal match funds. She ran again
in nineteen ninety two and again qualified for ballot status
in all fifty states, this time receiving two million dollars
in federal matching funds, and she secured a whop in
seventy three thousand, seven hundred and eight votes.

Speaker 4 (01:53:16):
That's always a depressing thing with these like the vanity
electoral campaigns, is seeing how much money they spent getting
like seven votes.

Speaker 12 (01:53:26):
Yeah, but I mean you'll never guess where this money
was going.

Speaker 4 (01:53:31):
Oh no.

Speaker 12 (01:53:33):
In the background, new Ones financial maneuvers seem to be
fundling a lot of the party's funds into other organizations
affiliated with Newman. Lauren Redwood, Working Class Lesbian, actually shared
her experiences working under the NAP in a letter to
a Gain newspaper in San Francisco. I won't read the

(01:53:54):
whole thing, but she basically talks about how she was
excited to help a black woman run for president. She
even found a lover while working on the campaign in Indiana,
but quote, when it came time for NAP to leave Indiana,
she I'm assuming the lover asked me to go with them,
and I did. I was given forty eight hours to prepare.

(01:54:14):
I quit my job, left my home, my friends put
my belongings in storage, found a home for my pet,
and gave the use of my car to NAP for
in exchange for their take and over the pay months
as a working class lesbian. I thought I had finally
found a political movement which included me. What I found
instead was an oppressive, disempowered, and misogynistic organization. All my

(01:54:35):
decisions were made for me by someone else. I was
told where to go and who to go with. I
worked seven days a week, sixteen to twenty hours a day.
I had two days off in two and a half months.
There was an incredible urgency which overrode any personal needs
or considerations, an urgency that meant complete self sacrifice. I

(01:54:56):
felt totally powerless over my life, forced into a very
submissive role where all control of my life belonged to
someone else. I had given up everything for the campaign,
my job, my home, and my support system. I felt desperate,
and later in the letter she said that I was
completely exhausted, so tired, I was unable to work well.

(01:55:17):
Being unable to work, I had no income as I
was expected to raise my salary myself in addition to
raising money for the campaign. And she also spoke about
losing herself and this social therapy thing that Newman was
doing as a lot of independent thought was discouraged. This
was Newman's whole emo, you know, manipulating individual distress to
transform members into political activists under total control, replacing the

(01:55:42):
traditional support structures that people would have been coming from
with the cult as a new family. And despite some
claims of dissolution, the evidence suggested that the International Workers'
Party continued to exist even as the NAP was in existence,
as members divested assets and funding towards the ideo BE

(01:56:06):
the whole time. Now, it's quite interesting to learn the
justification for why Newman picked Leonora Fulani in particular, and
then would also link up later with some of the
people that I'm about to talk about. So you're familiar

(01:56:28):
with Antonio Gramsci right, Yeah. He introduced the concept of
the organic intellectual, suggesting that each social class naturally produces
a stratum capable of projecting its historic mission and a
Germany on the flip side, Lenin in his What Is
to Be Done Manifesto, envisioned a vanguard of professional revolutionaries

(01:56:49):
from the intellectual elite to bring socialism to the working class.
Newman was influenced by both concepts and considered his core
group to be a vanguard mainly composed of white, middle
class traditional intellectuals, often working as therapists for Newmanite fronts.

(01:57:10):
But here's the twist. He borrowed gram Shee's organic leader's
term and connected with people of color that had organic
basis of support in their communities and would use them
to advance the interests of his secretive white.

Speaker 4 (01:57:24):
Vanguard ah the PSL.

Speaker 12 (01:57:29):
Indeed, so that's why Newman would create his own version
of the Rainbow Coalition with his Rainbow Assembly and also
would engage with people like Lewis.

Speaker 1 (01:57:40):
Farkhan, Al Sharpton and else.

Speaker 12 (01:57:43):
Yeah, however, and political incoherence goes BurrH, he'd also link
up with vague populist movements like Ross Puro's Reform Party,
who he'd work to register voters for, and in an
effort to gain more voters for the right winger Ross
Pero's Reform Party, Newman and Fulani would encourage the Patriotic

(01:58:03):
Party at the Independence Party of New York to link
up with Peru, and then in nineteen ninety nine, the
Newmanites threw their support behind the Paleo conservative pat Buchanans
presidential campaign. So, in addition to his political activity, is
Fred Newman wore many hats. He considered himself a playwright

(01:58:24):
and staled as the artistic director of the Castillo Theater.
He also directed train in at the east Side Institute
for Short Term Psychotherapy, authored books featured at the Castillo Bookstore,
and operated social therapy centers in various cities, describing them
as a unique development community. Despite the deprivations imposed on

(01:58:44):
his followers, as they can imagine, Newman lived quite comfortably.
In nineteen ninety three, he bought a substantial Greenwich Village
brownstone for nearly a million dollars. I mean, who says
a cult of revolution and therapy kabi profits, right?

Speaker 4 (01:59:04):
I keep I keep thinking about that. Oh God, I
forget which of the the Nepali maoist parties it was,
but one of one of one of the guys who
was the head of one of the Nepalese MAOIs parties
who'd been like fighting a guerrilla war for a long time.
The end of it was, he moved into the house
of the guy, the mansion of the guy who'd been

(01:59:24):
like Nepal's chief security minister.

Speaker 1 (01:59:27):
That's wild.

Speaker 4 (01:59:30):
It's a revolution because it goes in a circle and
you end up right back where you were.

Speaker 12 (01:59:36):
I don't remember that one. That's a that's a good quote. Yeah,
a lot of these organizations like bleazanty cults.

Speaker 1 (01:59:44):
But of course.

Speaker 12 (01:59:46):
Newmann, Fulani and others would always deny that they were
in a cult.

Speaker 1 (01:59:51):
Cults always do.

Speaker 12 (01:59:52):
So you look at the evidence, and the evidence points
to cult.

Speaker 4 (01:59:56):
Yeah, my, my, my, not a cult. T shirts raising
a a lot of questions that are answered by the
the T shirt.

Speaker 12 (02:00:03):
Yeah yeah, I love how when I first introduced my
organization after apply disclaimers were actually not a cult, you know,
like that one meme from King of the Hill.

Speaker 1 (02:00:18):
Right.

Speaker 12 (02:00:19):
So, one critic of Newman wrote an article called Inside
the New Alliance Party Dennis Surratt, and despite initially thinking
that the NAP was a progressive organization, he ended up
detailing psychological control, racism, sexism, and the use of millions

(02:00:39):
of dollars to manipulate well made individuals, particularly target in
the black community. The internal structure was of course hierarchical,
as Newman lived luxuriously while the rank and file members
worked to long hours and even faced mandatory taxes to
support new One's seaside mansion.

Speaker 1 (02:01:00):
Oh my god.

Speaker 12 (02:01:01):
Numan's political positions were opportunistic. Obviously, they changed based on
the perceived benefits to him and his attacks on individuals.
Organizations were ruthless when they failed to support him. When
members joined, whether through politics or therapy, they were required
to reveal all their resources and turn them over to
the organization. They had to go through mandatory psychotherapy sessions,

(02:01:27):
which served as a method to recruit vulnerable individuals, exploit
their weaknesses, and control their behavior.

Speaker 1 (02:01:34):
Now.

Speaker 12 (02:01:35):
In another article, Marina Ortiz, who was a former leader
in the New Alliance Party, explained why she resigned from
the NAP. What happened was the leadership told her to
put a child in foster care. I assume because the
child and her child care was getting in the way

(02:01:55):
of her full dedication to the cause. So she revealed
the NAP did not live up to claims of promoting
democracy obviously, and would use manipulative tactics and obstruct minority empowerment,
and had a long history of attacking progressives and embracing
Pero's nineteen ninety two presidential bid and the harsh streatment

(02:02:16):
dissent in voices. In the end, in the book On
the Edge, Denis Tursi and Tim Wreforth end up termining
Newman's work new age Leninism, which I think is a
really good phrase to use to describe what he was doing.
He had a strong knack for manipulating politics.

Speaker 1 (02:02:36):
And even with.

Speaker 12 (02:02:37):
Newman dead and gone, the Newmanites have already proved themselves
skilled political operatives, regardless of their actual size. So the
potential for someone to fill his role in the future
definitely remains, especially given the state of US politics.

Speaker 1 (02:02:56):
If you want to learn.

Speaker 12 (02:02:57):
More, like I said, definitely read on the Edge and
also check the article how Totalism Works by Alexandra Stein,
who was a survivor of a different cult who ended
up doing a dissertation on New One. As for final words,
stay away from cults base if it has Democratic Workers

(02:03:17):
Party or People's Party of such and such or popular support,
m scrutinize it a little bit, you know. Look, it's
like at the structure, that's like what they're asking you
to do, especially if the leadership considers themselves a vanguard
despite having like.

Speaker 1 (02:03:36):
Fifteen members.

Speaker 12 (02:03:39):
Honestly, you probably shouldn't follow a group of any size
that considers itself a vanguard.

Speaker 1 (02:03:45):
But that's.

Speaker 12 (02:03:47):
Typical for something for someone like me to putform. That's
that's all I have to say on New One. Check
on your friend with sexuals. They're probably going through it
right now. We'll power to all the people.

Speaker 4 (02:04:03):
Peace, Welcome to it could happen here a podcast coming
to you from a country rule by nine unelected dipshits
and hideous costumes. You can at a whim destroy your life.

(02:04:25):
I'm your host. Be along with me as Jim stout.

Speaker 11 (02:04:29):
Hi, I'm excited to hear about the Supreme Council or
whatever they called. It's like the Jedi Council.

Speaker 4 (02:04:36):
God, It's it's a problematic comparison in a lot of ways,
but like the thing I immediately think of is the
extent is like like Iran, Like I don't like and
you're not like Ran, right, but Iran gets so much
shit for having the Surer Council. Right, this is like
this council that's above their parliament, above their president, and

(02:04:56):
it can make a bunch of decisions as a bunch
of power. It's like, we also have a s Sure
a Council, except instead of protecting the Islamic Revolution, it's
designed to protect like the ideology of a bunch of
right wingers from Harvard And it's.

Speaker 11 (02:05:06):
Like, well this is great for sure, Like yes, yeah,
we we have a group of unelected, half dead people
whose entire thing is to protect like capital and specifically
the theft of land from indigenous peoples. That the thing
that that they love to do.

Speaker 4 (02:05:25):
And again to defend a round here, like we did
this first, Like this is like.

Speaker 11 (02:05:31):
That one won't get ever clipped out and used in
other context. That's great. We kind of pioted this right
like we were we were trying to trying to like
take the give monarchism a soft landing, you know, So
we we had some other unelected half dead people.

Speaker 4 (02:05:49):
Yeah, and this has the results of this have been
disastrous and are widely regarded by everyone as a disaster.
So we're gonna be talking about a few cases that
Supreme Court is going to do, and also we're going
to be talking about the street record and how it
relates to sort of liberal what I guess I would
call sort of liberal NGO, a sort of progressive NGO

(02:06:11):
political and legal strategy, because all of that stuff needs
to be thrown out the window immediately and it hasn't been. Yeah,
So all right, let's just start with Texas Bill four,
a very basically just like a turbo fascism bill that
lets Texas police racially profile someone and go, I think

(02:06:31):
this person's here legally and immediately arrest them.

Speaker 1 (02:06:33):
Yeah.

Speaker 11 (02:06:34):
Crucially, it's it's I think.

Speaker 4 (02:06:35):
Right, like yeah, so it's like again we are giving
the Texas police, like the heroes who ran away from Uvaldi,
we are giving them the power to go, this person
isn't white, I think they're here legally, I can arrest them.
And then if they do arrest someone who's undocumented. There's

(02:06:56):
the basically the way it works. It so it's it's
it's it sets up a series of like criminal penalties
like prison time. I think if you repeat offender, you
get a felony. But mostly what it does is it
less a judge immediately just support them.

Speaker 9 (02:07:09):
Now.

Speaker 4 (02:07:10):
Yeah, this is, to use a technical term, obviously insanely illegal,
like constitutionally like it is. The Constitution is very clear
that that immigration is is, you know, constitutionally the purview
of the federal government. It's very funny reading like Scotus
Blog because people have to sort of pretend that like

(02:07:31):
people are making real legal arguments here.

Speaker 11 (02:07:33):
Yeah, it's like when when Donald Trump is ever like
we're we're looking at Donald Trump's policies next week spoiler alert.
But like I've been writing about his proposed immigration policies
and you have to be like, no, this shit's just
fucking it's not legal. It's just not like, yeah, some
crackpot old dude who thinks the fringe is on the
flag mean that you're under abraltry law. That he's got

(02:07:55):
a fucking argument, but he's wrong, Like this is ready
to illegal shit.

Speaker 5 (02:08:00):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (02:08:00):
And so so this bill was supposed to go into effect.
There there's a whole series of very convoluted court battles
over it, and this real court was just like, yeah,
this can go into effect and until basically until the
case goes on, and then eventually it eventually didn't go
into effect because another another federal court was like, obviously
this is insane. We can't let this go into effect.

(02:08:21):
What the fuck are you guys talking about? And like
this this bill the legal justification for this, he's batshit.
It's so okay. They're trying to invoke the state war clause,
which is this is this really like old timey law? Okay.
So the thing the thing about like the seventeen hundreds,

(02:08:41):
in the eighteen hundreds is that it takes a significant
amount of time to get people from I don't know,
You're you're you're drawing your like border militia from Kentucky
and you're you're moving it to Texas.

Speaker 9 (02:08:55):
Right.

Speaker 4 (02:08:55):
That takes a lot of time. And so basically it
was like, okay, so if if you're Texas and you're
getting attacked by someone, you're supposed to be able to
use your own troops to defend it, and you're supposed
to be able to like sort of semi autonomously run
your own defense policy, right, And that was supposed to
be a thing to let to allow states to like
you know, use their militia to do stuff before like

(02:09:18):
federal troops got there. Abbott is arguing that people crossing
the border from Mexico is an invasion and that this
allows him to like legally allows him to start doing
this stuff. And this is like, it's it's funny because
you can even see that the Biden administration people being like,
you've got to be fucking kidding me, because like obviously,

(02:09:40):
like I mean, it's not like Biden doesn't want to
murder people coming over the border, but you know, Biden's
people are like, well, okay, like no, obviously this is
not a war, right, I mean just a no in
fact that war we're talking about.

Speaker 11 (02:09:54):
No, Yeah, I mean that that was kind of always
the obvious endpoint with this invasion military males rehetoric, right,
it was like, okay, well we better shoot them all
like that that was play what they were shooting for.

Speaker 4 (02:10:08):
Yeah, and it's it's really it's gotten. Really, it's gotten
really really grim and it's it's gotten you know again,
It's it's literally getting to this point when they're trying
to argue that there is a physical war going on
and you read these articles about it, and the press
will be like, well they're saying this because like people
are crossing the border and like there's cartels. It's like,
what the fuck are you talking about? This has nothing, like,

(02:10:28):
this is nothing. This is literally nonsense. Like it is.
They are pointing at the sky and going the sky
is orange, and the press is going, well, if you like,
if you stare directly into the sun and then blink,
it looks like maybe this sky is a little bit
or just like what the fuck are you people doing?
It's it's it's genuay at least it's some of the

(02:10:51):
worst shertalistic about practice I've ever seen you see this
like every single time they're trying to do this sort
of like ah balance, It's like, no, there's no actual
sort of balance here. But on the other hand, this
doesn't matter because the Supreme Court was just like, yeah,
this can go into effect, right, And like.

Speaker 11 (02:11:07):
The other thing you'll see, like I guess this was
more in the Trump era, right, was like, yeah, you'd
see someone Trump would do a thing and everyone rather
than just being like if this one's fucking illegal, everyone,
can we just wrap this up? Seth Aberton would write
seventy five thousand tweets about how like it was going
to result, and people began to have this belief that

(02:11:27):
like the fucking Supreme Court was made up of like
magical rainbow unicorns who were gonna sweep in and save
us all from fascistm Like these are the same people
hanging out with the guys who had the like fascist
statues and yeah, taking massive kickbags. Like it's just none
of this legality stuff. I guess, No, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 4 (02:11:49):
It doesn't matter.

Speaker 11 (02:11:50):
It's a problem, yeah, And like I think this is
something that you were hint to get earlier, but like
it shouldn't factor in our organizing. Like I see so
many people pinned so much hope on ex court case
or why court case like institutions created by people who
owned other human beings. I'm not going to fucking save us.

Speaker 4 (02:12:09):
Yeah, And you know, this is something that the right
has actually, I think understood it very well, partially in
the way that they've they've been able to sort of
institutionally capture huge portions of the court system. And because
they understand that the law is fucking meaningless and you know,
it's it's you can because and you can just tell
the cops to do whatever the fuck you want. One
of the strategies they've been using has like if specifically,

(02:12:30):
to get this bill through, is by just having judges
issue like temporary injunctions and other injunctions to like allow
them to go into effect, but then you know, with
the intention of just never letting them expire. Right, So
what you're getting basically is just judges implementing policy by
fiat by continuously going, oh, well, this can go, this
can go because we're giving like a where we're you know,
we're on like our thirty eighth one month injunction and right,

(02:12:54):
you know, and this is the thing that like the
Biden administration's plan to deal with this is to be like, well,
you shouldn't be able to do that, but like, how
are you going to stop them? Right? The court system
is set up in such a way that these people
are just feudal lords. They're almost completely autonomous. The only
people who can overrule them are the people above them.
But the problem there too, and this is what the

(02:13:15):
Republicans have been using very effectively, is that it takes
time for a court above it to you know, just
to overrule the like insane thing the court below them
is doing. And if the court below them is just
constantly churning out just nonsense over and over again, then
they can just do whatever the fuck they want. Because
even even if the court above them actually did want

(02:13:38):
to do something about this, which in a very rare
cases sometimes happens, they literally can't because they've just been
you know, because they're just sort of swamped by all
of this just absolute bullshit that's being thrown out.

Speaker 11 (02:13:49):
Yeah, Like, if you take a case which just to
not make this like a partizan thing, if you take
a case in which, like the Supreme Court might line
up with the I guess I love of republic competition
as a position that many people listening to this podcast
might take. For instance, California's gun laws, right, California passes
so many fucking gun laws so often that the time

(02:14:11):
that it takes for even if they are like contravening
something like the Brewin decision, right or the spirit of
the Brewing decision, it takes so long for them to
pass all the way up and maybe eventually go to
Supreme Court, maybe not right, that that in effect, California
can do things which seem like the Supreme Court would
say they were unconstitutional. It doesn't really matter because they

(02:14:36):
can still do them right. And with the go go
to the Night Circuit in California, you can make decisions
that affirm those and like it doesn't matter, It doesn't
matter what's constitutional or more importantly, like what's just.

Speaker 4 (02:14:53):
If you look if you're looking for the justices for
justice who are looking in the wrong place. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 11 (02:14:58):
And when it comes to bord Us, I guess before
that me is talking about like that kills people, you know,
like like and some of the most desperate people on earth.
Like I've been to the border in Texas, you know,
like you're not swimming across that river because you think
you might get a PlayStation five when you get to
the other side, Like it's fucking dangerous, and the journey

(02:15:19):
to get there. People who tend to come across the
land border to Texas sort of want to like micros
ain't fucking stupid. They have access to all the same
news and information that you do. They have smartphones that
might be a little bit older, but they can still
read shit and that they know that the ninth Circuit
is kinder. So if they have the money, they will
come to California. It's for some people end up in

(02:15:42):
California without very much money. We've seen that lot with
African migrants in Tichuina, But like a lot of the
people going to Texas, it's because that's the land route
walking north and they don't have the finances to go
anywhere else. And those people are extremely like they're like
there are any number of reasons why they they have
legitimate right to asylum or just a right not to

(02:16:02):
be fucking profiled, or like any other person of kind
of living in Texas has a basic right note to
be profiled, and demonizing those people is being used as
a like a trojan horse just to do straight up
racism law.

Speaker 4 (02:16:18):
Yeah, and then and meanwhile, like, you know, you have
fucking Clarence Thomas, who is sitting there, who has gotten
more kickbacks than every single one who's people who's crossed
the border of their total wealth combined, is just sitting
there being like, nah, fuck you, it's legal to throw
these people into the chainsaw, Like it's fine.

Speaker 11 (02:16:34):
Yeah, exactly, Like, I don't really know how people maintain
their faith in a system which holds this dude completely
unaccountable for very obviously being bent like bent is in corrupt.
I'm not using a homophobic slur.

Speaker 4 (02:16:47):
No, this is the way that's a homophobe. Yeah, I
think it's really a British English British wild Yeah, I've
never heard of either of those.

Speaker 11 (02:16:55):
I really. Okay, we're welcome to the podcast where I
say British things and in leep some of them out.

Speaker 4 (02:17:02):
Do you know what else says British things and occasionally
has some of them bleed it out.

Speaker 11 (02:17:06):
It's chump a Casino presented by Wangkas.

Speaker 4 (02:17:21):
And we're back from whatever insane gat We should at
some point do an episode about the gambling law changes
I'm sure that'll be fine.

Speaker 11 (02:17:30):
With yeah, go down, Well, it would be great.

Speaker 4 (02:17:33):
Oh boy, So we're there are some other so okay,
So the Texas Senate before case is coming in sort
of like mid late April, which is now this month,
by the way, which is nuts great, say snipe. There
are a couple of other cases coming down the pipeline
that we wanted to talk about because so obviously the

(02:17:53):
Streame court you know, has directly already done stuff with
s before, but the law there's still still in the
process for the lawsuit. There's also a case about methic pristone,
which is an aborder factor, which is, you know, one
of the ways that if you are if you're in
a place where it is illegal for you to normally
get an abortion, this is a way you can do it.

(02:18:15):
So okay. The basis of this case is that in
twenty sixteen twenty twenty one, the FDA did one of
the few good things it's ever done, and there were
some sort of changes to legal classifications around for pristone
that allowed you to get it, not allowed you to
get it without having to get it directly prescribed by
a doctor. So you know, you could have nurs practitioners

(02:18:37):
do it. And also it was a thing that didn't
work like you can get it over the counter like
it was. It was not a thing that suddenly that
requires an enormous amount of sort of doctor bullshit. And
it also used to require physical visits, so you'd have
to go find a doctor in another state and get
into private to you. And so that all went away.
You're able to get it through telemedicine. And immediately basically

(02:18:58):
after I get I guess probably the peak of the
Republican counter revolution in the last four years, where they
destroyed the National well, they destroyed the tatted remains of ROW,
A bunch of like deranged right wing groups set about
to get messapristomee bands and so basically what they're trying
to do is overturn. They're trying to get its approval

(02:19:22):
by the FDA overturn, and also the approval for the
generic version of it overturned. Right, And this is the
whole strategy here is very weird because okay, so this
is one of the things about the US and part
of the reason all of this court stuff is so
weird because of the structure of the sort of regional
autonomy of the courts. You can basically just do court shopping.

(02:19:44):
You can go find some like guy who's basically a
feudal baron in Texas and be like, hey, you hate abortion,
Like here, write some piece of paper that says this
is legal now. So there have been a series of
sort of battles over different levels of courts, you know,
like approving or disapproving some things. This is actually this

(02:20:05):
is one of these cases that's actually so obviously it's
the the immediate consequence here is if the Supreme Court
decides that you can ban this, it's going to get really,
really fucking bad for a lot of people. But this
is also a case that feeds into another trend that's
been happening, which is the Republicans attempting to use the
court system to just completely annihilate the federal bureaucracy. Because

(02:20:27):
the other thing that's at stake here and this is,
you know, obviously the people's access to getting abortions is
the most important part of it. The subsequent less important
part of it is that right now there is a
eight there are national standards for for prescriptions. Right there's
unified nationals like the ADA is unified national standards for
sort of food safety and like and if this gets

(02:20:49):
knocked out, that's like gone. Yeah, and so suddenly large
massive parts I mean like courts having the ability to
just sort of go in and nuke FDA approvals for stuff,
right states being able to like this is going to
rip like tear, like like tearing the fucking guts out
of the entire American sort of like legal bureaucracy. It's

(02:21:13):
it's coming apart, Yeah, it's yeah.

Speaker 11 (02:21:16):
And and the the they're like the medical you know,
your access to medicines that someone else doesn't want you
to have.

Speaker 4 (02:21:24):
Yeah, this is one of these cases that has you know,
there's there's sort of two elements at work here, right,
there's there there's there's there's the there's the immediate like
Republicans are trying to ban every single way you can
possibly get an abortion to force people to have kids
because this is you know, this is part of their
sort of reactionary ideology. And then there's the other part

(02:21:44):
of it, where there's been there's been a few other
cases like this too. One of the one of the
things that looks like they're trying to do is get
we're gonna I'm gonna do a full upside about this
at some point when I can get a good labor
lawyer to talk about it. But they're trying to overturn
the National Labor Relations Act, which is the act that
basically sets up the right to unionization and the whole

(02:22:05):
the whole process of how how labor mediation works. And
I mean then there's other ones where I mean, like
really substantively enormous parts of the American sort of the
American state are just being torn apart in ways that
are specifically designed to just allow corporations and these like

(02:22:27):
fiefdom judges to have effectively unlimited political power.

Speaker 11 (02:22:32):
Yeah, I don't know, it's it's a fucking bleak, Like
it's I mean, it's also predictable, right, Like it's kind
of the nature of the state, and it's the nature
of these people to want to take away Like the
state ultimately is not there to protect you, It's there
to protect capital. And like it's a failure of our

(02:22:53):
organizing when we when we keep going back to the
state and asking it to do something fundamentally has no
interest in doing.

Speaker 4 (02:23:00):
Yeah, and this is really a substantive issue with you know,
I remember this. This was the ACOU strategy under Trump.
I've talked about this in the show before. It is
the sho U strategy under Trump was to go to
the courts and win there. And I mean this is
this has been the sort of what the political strategy
getting back to sort of the civil rights era. And
that's it's you can't do this anymore because it doesn't

(02:23:22):
It doesn't even like whether or not you are correct,
like like legally correct about a thing right which used
to be what this was just sort of hinged on
and whether you could convince justice to this, like this
doesn't matter anymore. Like they've you know, like if if
you if you read the ruling on on like if
you actually go through and read the ruling that overturned

(02:23:44):
Rode Wade right, like the league, the legal logic in
there is deranged. It's just like, yeah, we didn't have
this X number of years ago, so fuck it, Like
you can't do this now. It's like this is this
is nonsense, but it doesn't matter because the the the
actual weight of the law is not is not you know,
a sort of like series of debates about like logic

(02:24:07):
or about the efficacy or the meeting of text. It's
just about who has the power to point guns at people?
And the answer is you don't have that you, you,
dear listener, do not have that power. Okay, do you
know who else is going to destroy the American federal bureaucracy? Oh?

Speaker 11 (02:24:24):
Yes, yes I do.

Speaker 5 (02:24:25):
Mayeah.

Speaker 11 (02:24:25):
It's it's a production and services. It's pot this podcast,
and we are back for more horrors.

Speaker 4 (02:24:42):
So we're going to talk about one more case, which
is grap Pass versus Johnson, which is a case to
decide whether or not you can make it illegal to
be homeless.

Speaker 11 (02:24:52):
Yeah, yeah, talking pointing guns at people. This one's This
one's about pointing guns at homeless people, which is great,
great and good. So this is one I've been following
a little bit just because one thing that Todd Lauria
loves to do is criminalize poverty. And I happen to,
unfortunately live in a city of which he is mayor

(02:25:12):
in San Diego. We have seen, like it's all the
things they told your Republicans would do, our Democrat mayor
is doing. And what the Grants passed usus Johnson case
is about. It's a city of Grant's past, which I
guess is a place in Oregon, and it's whether they
can criminalize sleeping on the street if there are no

(02:25:34):
safe shelter beds available. So that the idea here being
that like again, like this is one has to understand
that I'm speaking from the logic of the state when
I try and explain this, like that, if there is
a shelter bed to go to, they can compel you
to go to it with threat of prosecution, right or criminalization.

(02:25:55):
But if there is not a shelter bed to go to,
then like you're not somehow your culpability changes, right, Like
you're not refusing to take shelter there is no shelter
few to take. And so Grant's past is obviously trying
to criminalize people even when there are shelter beeds available. Now,
what's interesting about Grant's pass is that not the place

(02:26:18):
to the court case. What's interesting about the court case
is that you'll see these big liberal cities filing amicus
briefs amicus. It literally means it's from amicus curii friend
of the court, right, which they can do in favor
of either side. San Diego, Los Angeles, other large democratic cities,
I'm sure all filing briefs in favor of criminalizing living

(02:26:40):
on the street even when there are not shelter beds available. Now,
if we look at the San Diego context specifically, one
of the questions which will come up in this case
is what is a shafe shelter bed? So what San
Diego likes to do currently is put people into tents
in parking lots where they often flood because because San

(02:27:02):
Diego is not designed to deal with rain, and because
our city has completely failed to clear out storm drains,
resulting in people losing their homes in this winter, right,
and so some of these parking lots flood where people
have lived are forced to live. These tents are not like,
they're not even good tents. Actually they managed to buy
this is remarkable. Actually, if you were buying a tent there,

(02:27:25):
can you think of any well, there's no way for
me to phrase this. They bought fucking tents with slurs
on the side. I don't know how you managed to do. Yeah,
it's like the tents are quote Esquimo brand Jesus Christ. Yeah,
it's it's it's it's incredible stuff. Like it's see, there
was no way to be like, what would you be

(02:27:45):
concerned about when buying a tent because a slur on
the side would not have come up.

Speaker 4 (02:27:49):
I would not think about that. Why why would you?
Why would there be slur? Why would there be slurs
on the side of your tent? Yeah? Yeah, why were
you doing here?

Speaker 13 (02:27:58):
How could you given the purchasing of the third largest
city in California, somehow elects to purchase a tent, which
is racist, Like, I don't know, but that's.

Speaker 11 (02:28:08):
Why I am not a member of the San Diego
Democrat Party. So one of the things that will come
up is what constitutes a safe shelter in practice. Again,
this doesn't matter hugely other than it's a Supreme Court
giving a nod to local governments to further criminalize being
un housed, to drive unhouse people further from services, further

(02:28:31):
from site. Right in San Diego's case, that means into canyons,
into rivers, rivers, flood canyons, get extremely hot in the summer.
More than one person every single day already dies on
our streets here in an extremely wealthy and prosperous area
of the world. This will make it worse because they
will get that nod to continue criminalizing people rather than trying.

Speaker 1 (02:28:50):
To help them.

Speaker 11 (02:28:51):
In practice, what cities will do, including San Diego, is
just hold back a few shelter beds to allow them
to cite anyone. Right it practice, they're still going to
cite people even if the demand for beds is much
higher than the provision of beds. So like, in that case,
they will still continue to find it's not a workaround.

(02:29:11):
But they think it is right that they can just
criminalize being in house in this fashion. But it it does,
it represents like a nod from the top down right
to go even harder after people who are too poor
to make rent at a time when rent is less
affordable than it has been in generations. And so like
it's one to watch. It's one where like yet again

(02:29:33):
you find like the Democrats, I guess, lining up on
the right hand side of the issue, the right wing
side of the issue, the state violence side of the issue. Right,
and it will I'm sure open up the door to
more what they call camping bands, which is the euphemism
again they are bands on being un housed within city limits, right,
And I think it's one to keep an eye on.

(02:29:57):
But again, like I don't it's Clarence Thomas the guy
who goes to the billionaire's house with the racist statues
and the Nazi statues, Like, he's not the guy who's
going to come in swinging for the person who has
to sleep under the underpass because they can't make rent,
you know, like.

Speaker 4 (02:30:12):
And like like if if you think the fucking liberal
justices are going to give a shit either, like these
are these are the people whose fundamental political principles that
the police have the right to. Like, Okay, there is
a decision that I can't remember the fucking name of
that was a it was it was, it was, it was.
It should have been a very very basic you are
guaranteed due process thing right under the Fourth Amendments and this,

(02:30:33):
and in a nine to o decision, the Supreme Court
ruled that the cops are allowed to violate people's due
process because if they didn't do this, there couldn't be
a functional police force in this country because this is
how the police were doing all their fucking work. So
if you think those people right, that was nine oh
nine zero decision, that was that was a fucking Ruth

(02:30:55):
Bader Ginsburg special, Right, those people are going to be like,
oh hey, damn, maybe people who don't own property, have rights?
Like how no?

Speaker 11 (02:31:08):
Like yeah, no, Like, Look, when faced with a choice
between like liberty and then then the necessity of maintaining
a state's capacity to do violence to anyone at any time,
they chose the latter right. And I guess, like, if
I can get on my soap box for a minute, like,
you need to stop expecting these people to come and
save you, like specifically with reference to the fucking Grants

(02:31:28):
past case, Like the person who is going to stop
your unhoused neighbor dying is you. It's not an NGO,
it's not the city, it's not the county, it's not
the feds. Those people fundamentally that they're the incentive is
not for them to care. Like your incentive, as a
person who shares humanity with that person is to care
and to do something. And like, yeah, I guess, like,

(02:31:51):
don't wait, take the time you would have spent reading
about a fucking Supreme Court case and make sandwiches and
go hand them out, because that is the only way
we solve this.

Speaker 4 (02:32:00):
I think that's as good a place as I need
to stop. Yeah, this has been making up here.

Speaker 2 (02:32:07):
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the universe.

Speaker 5 (02:32:13):
It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.

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For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.

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Dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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Thanks for listening.

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Behind the Bastards News

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Host

Robert Evans

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