It Could Happen Here Weekly 140

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
A 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. Welcome back to it

(00:29):
could happen here, a podcast that basically all of last
week is about the twenty twenty four Republican National Convention,
a four day period of time that I'm not sure
ever ended or ever really had a beginning. As of
right now, we are stuck in the hotel because what
we initially thought was a hack and may just have

(00:51):
been a fuck up pushing an update by cloud strike,
but by any measure of the word is like the
greatest computer disaster of mine modern times has stranded every
Republican in the country in the city of Milwaukee.

Speaker 3 (01:05):
With Yeah, we are trapped with every single Republican in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin as we wait for airports like a Stephen kingne
it's feeling quite dystopian. We've already been dealing with a
great deal of like time dilation. Just this past week,
this week has felt it first just felt like a month,

(01:26):
and then it just felt like an eternity. Yeah, like
we were just always reporting on the RNZ. This is
this is all we have ever done.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
Every single day of this was longer than my childhood.

Speaker 3 (01:34):
Yeah. No, I feel like all I've ever done is
a person is be someone who reports in the RNC.
This is just the entirety of my existence and life purpose.

Speaker 2 (01:42):
It's like that Star Trek episode where they have like
the fake casino because they found these aliens found a
stranded astronaut and to try to make him comfortable, like
recreated a dime store novel, and all of these fake
people have only ever lived in the casino, experiencing the
same day forever. That's us, that's us at the rn sight.

Speaker 3 (02:01):
I was only created to report on the RNC.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
Did I have a before? Did I have an after?
Absolutely not. Yeah. Anyway, so we're doing well, is the
short of that.

Speaker 3 (02:12):
Yeah, we're mentally healthy and well and well suited to
handle this political task.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
I guess the big story, the one that's really worth
us talking about right now, is that last night you
and I went to see the Trump speech spectacular. Now,
every day of the convention, during the early part of
the day, you'll have some speeches, and you'll have even
some outside of the event. Different groups and organizations will
rent out hotel, ballrooms, conference rooms, they'll give speeches, they'll

(02:40):
do panels, there's workshops, and obviously inside the wire, so
to speak, you have different dignitaries, politicians, you know, Ted
Kruz will come by and I'll sit down to be
interviewed by a podcaster, a radio host. Rudy Giuliani's doing
the same thing. You've got all these people who do
their shows live from the event and then in the
evenings usually starting around like five to seven and something
like that. Yeah, you start having speeches, and part of

(03:03):
what you know, speeches at the RNC are it's obviously
it's a way to hype up the base. This is
the base. And one of the things I try to
get across to people I posted on day one while
there were some very dystopian shit coming out Marjorie Taylor
Green speech and whatnot, how empty you know the stadium
was to be, like, look, there's not that many people here,

(03:25):
And someone was like, well, it's kind of dishonest to
say that, because this is an invite on the event
that you need credentials for. And well, that's my point though,
is like as crazy as a lot of this stuff is,
and we're going to get into a lot of the crazy,
you don't also you don't want to discount it because
these people are very powerful and they can do a
lot of damage, and they there's a very good chance
they're going to wind up with very close to total power.

(03:46):
But they're also not representative of like a massive chunk
of this country. Like these are the weirdest of the weird.
These are the high freaks of Republican party politics. These
are the nabobs and priests and shamans of their political class.
And so you shouldn't over extend the craziness to think that, like, well,
every one of my neighbors who is a conservative is

(04:08):
this kind of person. Now, some of you do have
neighbors who are this kind of person.

Speaker 3 (04:11):
So, and Trump's speech was certainly much more well attended
than any other.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
Yes, and it was it was also a very different
vibe because all of those other nights, all of the speeches.
You know, a big part of what this is for
the people who get speeches is like, we want to
give you a reward for being a good party soldier,
but no one wants to promise you a cabinet position
right now. You know, we can't get like, so we'll
give you a speech at the RNC. You can lead,

(04:37):
and you can get on right before Tucker, you know,
or you can come on right after Tucker or whatever
like that, you know, And it's kind of how you
it's one way to dole out favors, right, because it's
good for people's you know, if you're head up an organization,
it might get you some fundraising at any rate. It
makes you look more connected at something you brag about
to your friends. You get to go backstage and be
around the VIPs and whatnot, be a VIP yourself.

Speaker 3 (05:00):
And that certainly the case for someone like the VEC, right,
someone who doesn't hold like that office, never has, Yeah,
but he's trying to position himself as being, you know,
an active part of this political project act.

Speaker 2 (05:10):
Franklin Graham, Billy Graham's killer who gave a speech. That's
not a guy who's you know, an elected leader, but
it's he's a guy you won on your side, so
let's give let's give him a nice position. We'll put
him right after whol Cogan.

Speaker 3 (05:22):
Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
Which I guess is you know that that kind of
gets it why Thursday was so different from the other
nights because while the other Knights felt like a political convention,
because the Dims do the same thing, right like that
their speeches occupy roughly the same role in their party.
Last night felt like a concert. Last night was the
vibes of like a show. You are going to get

(05:46):
hyped up and see a show. People were static. There
was actually music acts like, not just the band that
plays in between speeches, but Kid Rock came out and
did a set.

Speaker 3 (05:57):
It was all a big put on before Ormans, Yes
it was. It was in many cases well put on.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
Yeah, yeah, it was very competently stage managed. There's no
no denying that. We can talk about the content of
the speech, and I've seen a lot of it, you know,
same Sater who you know. I like, I'm not trying
to shit, I'm not gonna shit on Sam or anything.
But I saw his take being like I felt like
this was kind of this seems like it's a weak speech.
It's not very coherent. You know, people in the audience

(06:23):
looked sleepy. That was not the vibe during Trump speech.

Speaker 3 (06:26):
I see where he's coming from, because this was one
of the quieter Trump's speeches.

Speaker 2 (06:30):
Trump is quieter, sure.

Speaker 3 (06:32):
I think this this this was an intentional effort to
blend some of his more classic talking points with this
elder statesman kind of vibe and selectively utilizing the assassination
attempt to talk about both yourself as this like broader
political figure that that people should unite behind, because this

(06:53):
incident really shows how divided we are, and what we
really need to do to unite the country is stop
attacking Trump, and that's the only way to do it.
So like this, this was all on purpose and kind
of using that more sympathetic unity messaging to squeeze in
all of his same extremely far right talking points, just
slipping in between calls for like unity and ending division

(07:15):
and all of that.

Speaker 2 (07:15):
And also the fucking the boys are playing in women's
sports and.

Speaker 3 (07:18):
The cannibal elector the late Gray.

Speaker 2 (07:21):
He had a Hannibal But we should we're getting ahead
of ourselves. But I do want to just kind of
say upfront. My take differs from what I've seen from
Sam Cedar and what I've seen from a number of
folks who watched, you know, the closed circuit version of this.
The audience loved it. Yeah, like they loved it, and
you can you can taste in the air the degree
to which they love Trump. This is like not if

(07:44):
you have not been to one of these rallies. And
even this is different because I've been to a you know,
a regular Trump rally. This was different than that because
this is again like the most dedicated chunk of the base.
It's the very much a religious experience for these people.

Speaker 3 (07:59):
Yeah, no, it definitely had that spiritual vibe. So the
first speaker, we wanted to really get to in person
to hear talk with Tucker, and Tucker, you have a
very efficient speech. He did not read off a teleprompter.
He was at living the best speech at the convention.
He was he was, he was. He was a pretty
good speaker. And I know we often will make fun
of kind of Tucker's mode of speaking on television, which

(08:21):
can come off as a little bit like disjointed and
kind of just like confused. You know, he has that
like resting confused look on his face. He was a
very good live performer. Yeah, this he gave a stronger
live performance than I think what a lot of his
televised performances come off at. He was.

Speaker 2 (08:36):
He gave an eerdit and smooth summary of fascist ideology
of specifically what used to be called the Futor prinzip
or Fewer principle, which is this idea that came out
of the Nazi movement of a nation being embodied by
a man, and the man is accountable to the people,

(08:57):
not in a sense that we would consider like checks
and ballot and says, but in some deep spiritual connection
that they have. And Tucker very directly like like hearkened
to that. He made a comment about like you know,
Trump talked to me and he was like, you know,
when I got shot, I expected to see the crowd running, screaming, stampeding, panicking,
and no one did. And Tucker was like, that's because

(09:19):
you're the leader, and the leader the people follow the leader,
and they you know, you didn't panic, so they won't panic. Yeah,
it's the most direct old style. This is nineteen twenties
Nazism stuff that Tucker is throwing out. And he he
discussed it in a way that was very smooth and
very palatable to American ears. And that was the most

(09:41):
chilling part of the night for me, because Trump's speech
was not a particularly I think back to twenty sixteen
and I was I was at the R and C
in twenty sixteen. Trump's speech on the last night of
the R and C was his blood in the Street speech.
It was a he was angry, it was aggressive. It
was a violent speech, right, and there were there were moments,
certainly silence in his speech, but not much that was

(10:02):
not the overall vibe. That was not what he built towards.
It wasn't the thing he ended on, and it was
never really a focus. But what Tucker was focusing on
was getting people on board the concept that they are
bonded to Trump in a spiritual sense and that the
nation is and that Trump is the leader, not by
dint of having been elected, but by dint of some

(10:25):
sort of psycha like psycho religious mystic bond.

Speaker 3 (10:31):
Tucker was also the first guy I heard of the
convention to mention Antifa at all, first and only saying
Antifa is the Democrats owned militia, which is, you know
something that you would hear four years ago, and right
before Tucker's speech, I actually was talking with Robert being like, hey,
I've not heard anyone mention INTIFA this entire week, and

(10:51):
like this was used to be such a big thing
in their political messaging, both like four years ago, two
years ago, and this week, it was just completely absent. Obviously,
it has been replaced by some of this like gender ideology, groomer,
kind of transpanic type stuff, but it is a noticeable
absence in the current talking points of the Republican Party
save for this one mentioned by Tucker.

Speaker 2 (11:13):
Yeah, and you know, during Trump's speech, I don't even
recall him bringing up the radical left. He didn't even
He made a couple of joke and these those on
the two of the jokes that that got the best
crowd response from him is he would bring up Biden,
but they say, I'm not going to mention his name.
I promise I won't talk about him, you know, And
that got a laugh every time that he did it,
which I counted twice. He did make one reference to

(11:34):
the shooter and said he tried to stop our movement. Yeah,
greatest movement in the history of the country. And yeah,
that was interesting to me. I think that he was
kind of playing easing off the gas on that one,
because there's still so much that's uncertain about the shooter
and his motives. I went to work out today because
the morning after convention, that's kind of how I purged

(11:55):
the hangover from my body. And I was watching Fox
News on the TV in the gym, And I don't
watch television news much because I'm a person who has
to do things, but it is useful sometimes because it
connects you with how an unfortunate number of people in
this country do and take their news. And this morning,
one of the reports was about the shooter and how
the FBI had found that he had three encrypted accounts

(12:19):
offshore overseas that they're trying to break into. They are
referring to I think discord kind of accounts and stuff
like that, like he might have like an.

Speaker 3 (12:29):
We have like a WhatsApp, he might have WhatsApp inn account.

Speaker 2 (12:31):
Yeah, it's an encrypted email possibly. Yeah, the stuff that
like I have, most people have. But they were like,
so this makes it even more likely that Iran is involved.
You know, there's some sort of a rant because like
overseas that means Iran oh man, there's lots of companies
that have encrypted apps that aren't based in the we
I used to shill for a VPN that was based
I think Nord is based in Switzerland. Maybe I'm wrong

(12:53):
about that, but like some of the VPNs are based
in Switzerland and like these are not. It's not that
it's overseas. Does not mean there's any tie to anything
other than this kid, like a lot of people had,
was used in encrypted messaging platforms. Obviously, I'm interested, you know,
if the FBI, if or when they get into that stuff,
what they find. But I don't think they're going to

(13:14):
find that. The fucking Ayatola gave this guy a five
hundred dollars AR fifteen and fifty rounds of ammunition.

Speaker 3 (13:23):
That is certainly doubtful. I mean, yeah, I think Tu
Tucker had some of the best audience reactions since Marjor
Taylor Green's speech. He called jd Vance a friend said
that Advance's politics, They're closer to the average Trump voter
than anyone else in Washington. And yeah, just an overall
very very polished speech.

Speaker 2 (13:42):
Yeah, we should probably do an ad break now, huh,
we should. We're back so after Tucker. We had a
couple of other people come on. There was a woman
who worked for an education a conservative education political activist group,

(14:08):
who her whole thing was, you know, I worked in
prisons for a while and then I switched over to
working in schools. And the thing that shocked me is
our schools are so much more of our schools are
like prisons, which I was like, well, actually, there's a
lot to be said about the way in with some
of the same technology, right, yes, no, this is there's
a lot to do. And then she was like, because
children are much more violent than convicted felons, and like, oh,

(14:33):
a lot of what she was saying is that, like,
schools are completely out of control. And obviously, in the
wake of the height of the COVID pandemic and the lockdown,
school violence did soar. It's been coming back down. Overall,
schools have been getting less violent in every single way
but shootings for twenty straight years. And that is that
is the case now, like under in Joe Biden's America, schools,

(14:55):
like violence that is not related to shootings is going down.
But what she was saying is that we need to
be able to expel and suspend kids, particularly, suspend kids
more often for bad behavior. There is actually quite a
bit of data that shows that when you suspend children,
it makes them more likely to offend and disrupt class

(15:15):
in the future, Like it increases the problems that you
are supposed to be stopping. Like most conservative measures that
are kind of like punitive in nature, it doesn't actually
do the trick. I don't know why I'm arguing with
this lady, but it is important that that's a big
part of how they're pitching what ultimately is a plan

(15:37):
to win the Department of Education to parents is like,
your schools are so dangerous for your kid, you need
to be able to have a voucher to send them
to a private school. And we need to be able
to kick these underperforming black students out of schools in
order to make them safer for everybody, right, and shuffle
them off into the car serial system.

Speaker 3 (15:58):
Right. This whole speech was kind of a coded way
of talking about like urban crime. She blamed this problem
on an Obama Biden policy to limit suspension rates. Whe
Trump undid and yeah, said that the solution is both
more suspensions and more school resource officers, which a Kido
Institute says actually increases the number of Island instants in schools.
So but again, of course they're going to call for

(16:20):
more police. This is the Republican Party.

Speaker 2 (16:22):
Honestly, I don't know why we even bother like fact checking.
This is important because I care, like in you care,
and but like our audience knows, the lady that gets
up to talk about school policy at the R and
C is not going to be bringing out good policy.

Speaker 3 (16:38):
But this is just how everything works. Like this just
kind of underlines the alternate world that is formed in
places like this.

Speaker 2 (16:45):
Yeah, and you can't you can't fight these people with facts.
That is the mistake liberals always make. It's like, well,
if we can just out argue them, if we can
get them, get them in front of the American people
and see how bankrupt their ideas are. And that's not
how you do it. Now. That's not to say that
you shouldn't get out and engage with them, because what
does work is showing the American people reminding them these
are freaks. These people are weird. These people are off putting,

(17:08):
These people are scary, and you don't want to be
around them, and by god, you don't want them with
their finger on the button, Like I do think that consistently.

Speaker 3 (17:15):
Works, and unfortunately that freaks nature can sometimes help them,
like when you pull out hul cogd onto stage waving
an American flag, calling Trump his hero and his gladiator.

Speaker 2 (17:25):
And talking about how, yeah, all of America are gonna
be the Trump bites, that's what they're gonna call him,
which apparently he used to do with nWo back in
the day, back in his glory day he got he
couldn't stop himself from talking about beating Andrea the Giant
at WrestleMania. I think it was like nineteen eighty three.
He made two different Andre the Giant references, both of
which were very mean. To Andre the Giant, who I wish,

(17:49):
Oh Andre, No, the wrong one died.

Speaker 3 (17:53):
Al Cogan compared the energy of the RNC to a
WWE match, which he is not was not wrong, It's
very similar. Look, I'm not gonna like hull Cogan understands
this crowd, oh more than almost more than maybe any
other actual speaker. Yeah, like like Tucker kind of understands them,
but but hull Cogan even more so.

Speaker 2 (18:11):
They loved him. Yeah when he ripped his shirt off.

Speaker 3 (18:15):
Oh yeah, Tank top underneath.

Speaker 2 (18:19):
That was the best moment of the RNC. That was
the moment where I was like, all right, fuck it.

Speaker 3 (18:23):
He said that he usually stays out of politics, but
after what happened on Saturday, he could no longer stay silent,
and then spend you know, the rest of the speech
just praising Trump, saying how tough he is, saying that
you know, he's survived all these court cases, these investigations, impeachments,
and we need a tough man to take on like politicians,
criminals and drug dealers. And no, it was It was

(18:44):
a in a week full of kind of surreal moments
where you're seeing these people that you only interact with
on a screen. H you just see them walk past you,
like all the time every day. This was certainly one
of the most surreal men.

Speaker 2 (18:55):
And Cawthorne nearly hit me with his wheelchair. And I'm
not the only one I talked to with that story.
He's a little reckless, So I'm gonna be honest.

Speaker 3 (19:07):
Maybe he thought you were a tree.

Speaker 2 (19:08):
Maybe he thought it.

Speaker 1 (19:09):
Was a tree.

Speaker 2 (19:11):
I love that we saw two people, two Republicans at
this convention, both of whom have a tragic tree story.
So I'm talking about Greg Abbott.

Speaker 3 (19:22):
They made the kind of baffling decision on the schedule
to put Franklin Graham after Hulk Hogan.

Speaker 2 (19:28):
Not not nice to Franklin Graham, to be honest, No, yeah,
because he's he did the thing that like usually gets
a good reaction, which is the prayer. Right He's there
to do the prayer, and this is a good crowd
for a prayer, right, Like, that's not a that's not
like a lame thing to these people. They love doing that.
But no one's heart was fully into the prayer after Hulk, Like,
you can't, you can't get the people. It's a it's

(19:51):
a tough come down from Hulk Hogan ripped his shirt
off on stage too. Now let's bow our heads and
thank God.

Speaker 3 (19:58):
But if you didn't grow up iny Minchelle Circles of
Franklin Graham is the son of Billy Graham, possibly the
most famous pastor in American history, at least in the
past one hundred.

Speaker 2 (20:07):
Years, since sinners in the hands of an angry God,
like the most popular man of faith in the country.

Speaker 3 (20:12):
And he closed his prayer by saying, all authority comes
from you, speaking of God, and we ask if it
be thy will that you will make America great once again.
Just a wonderful, a wonderful Christian message.

Speaker 2 (20:25):
Uh huh grand So that was nice, and Eric Trump
gave a very Uh he tried his best, which is
basically what Trump said. Again, you Hulk Hogan has just
been on, Trump is about to be on. It is
the last night of the RNC, and everyone is absolutely
certain of victory. So as a speaker tonight, you couldn't

(20:46):
be more teed up for a good reaction. And he
could barely get laughs, he could barely get cheers. Like
even when he did the anti trans stuff, it didn't
get it got a muted reaction, not because people aren't bicketed,
because they loved it when Marjorie Taylor Green did the
say they loved it when Trump did. Eric Trump just

(21:06):
sucks yeah at speaking, probably at everything, but he did
not get a reaction. I cannot overemphasize to you how
little this crowd wanted to listen to Eric.

Speaker 3 (21:17):
Yeah, no, I mean he shout it out. Monster Liberty
said that the Trump admin will fight against brainwashing, and
schools will fight against homeless people, specifically taking resources from
veterans and of course trans people in sports.

Speaker 2 (21:29):
He kept bringing up Ukraine to stealing resources from Americans.
He was like the most brought up Ukraine in a
derogatory sense, more than I think any other single speaker
at the convention, which is interesting because his dad took
even a bit of a different tact with that. So yeah,
I found that interesting. But I did not find his
speech interesting because he is a bad speaker.

Speaker 4 (21:50):
Now.

Speaker 3 (21:50):
The only line I found interesting is when he was
talking about how all of Donald Trump's political enemies aren't
just happy going after him, but also going to be
going after every Republican. And he said the greatest retribution
will be our success. Yeah, and they've been using network
a lot this year, retribution retribution.

Speaker 2 (22:08):
And you know, he did kind of in the end,
getted a little bit of applause. That's it was like
the fifth or sixth best standing ovation of the night.
So again, at his best, was never able to really rile.

Speaker 3 (22:20):
Them up, especially when he's talking about assassination attempt. I mean, yeah,
the crowd chounting fight.

Speaker 2 (22:24):
Yeah, that's what got them back on board and interesting.
They loved talk about that, I think in part because
it had been so absent earlier.

Speaker 3 (22:31):
Yeah, it was talking about way more today than basically
all the other days of the week combined.

Speaker 2 (22:37):
Yeah, yeah, and that makes sense. I mean, it was
the day that Trump came out to speak, you know, and.

Speaker 3 (22:41):
You know what we're going to talk about now or
not talk.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
About assassinating your thirst with hopefully a soda company advertising
on the podcast. Otherwise this ad segue is not going
to make much sense.

Speaker 3 (23:04):
All right. Time for Donald Trump himself, he's coming out.
They they they set this stage, they got.

Speaker 2 (23:10):
Everything to be an American.

Speaker 3 (23:13):
And then they announced Kid.

Speaker 2 (23:15):
Rock, Oh my god, and he comes out and the
whole stage is wreathed in massive screens, like dozens of
feet tall, and they all are portraying fire and American.

Speaker 3 (23:30):
Flag, American flags that look kind of like they're on
fire burning.

Speaker 2 (23:34):
Kid Rock comes out and does a rap set to
burning American flags surrounding him.

Speaker 3 (23:39):
Just it was kind of just a fascinating image for
the RNC.

Speaker 2 (23:42):
The refrain is they call me Cowboy. He said that
like forty times, and he just kept going Trump, Trump, Trump, Fight, Fight, Fight, And.

Speaker 3 (23:50):
They loved it. They loved it. Was It was very
high energy. It was it was a concert. Everyone everyone,
everyone had a great time.

Speaker 2 (23:57):
Yeah, Yeah, it got a good reaction. People were hyped up.
It is the loudest, stupidest thing I have ever seen
in my life, but it got a really good reaction.
People loved kid Rock coming out. It's interesting to me
that they chose to have kid Rock basically lead directly
to the president rather than than the Hulkster. But I

(24:17):
don't know. If I were if I had been setting
this up, I would have done Franklin Graham, school Lady,
Eric Trump, all the weak ones up first, and then
probably Tucker the Hulkster, Kid Rock, you know.

Speaker 3 (24:32):
Yeah, the NSC should really hire you to man their schedule.

Speaker 2 (24:35):
Yeah, I'm available, guys.

Speaker 3 (24:38):
So after we all kid rocked out, technically, Dana White
gave the introduction or Dana White.

Speaker 2 (24:44):
Yeah, they bring in Dana White, who has who is
the UFC CEO. Yeah, who is also on video hitting
his wife in the face. This is not a debatable,
he said. She said, he is on video. You can
watch it.

Speaker 3 (24:58):
Yeah, And he gave a very very very typical strength
and security speech to introduced Trump, who emerged from behind
one of the big the big screens.

Speaker 2 (25:09):
Well, proud to be an American plays and like the
entire crowd stands up and they're all singing along to
Proud to Be an American. They love that song.

Speaker 3 (25:19):
He'd started his speech, and one of the interesting things
is that he said that he's going to tell the
story of what happened at the assassination attempt here right now,
but won't tell it ever again because it's too painful
to tell.

Speaker 2 (25:32):
Yeah, I'll be interested to see how often he does,
because it is like just based on his body language,
because he's been out every night but not saying anything,
and he does has looked a bit different, and I'm
not going to do the whole thing. Some of the
fucking you had some like Politico being like, it's a
new Trump, He's become a statesman. They definitely that's what

(25:52):
the RNC is trying to sell you on. That's nonsense.
But he has changed in the way that like you
would be if you were shot in the head and survived,
you know, like anyone is go like, he's not a robot, right,
Like anyone is going to be affected by that. And
he might not have been lying. He might just have

(26:13):
been like, look, I have to talk about this once.
I really don't want to keep talking about this because
it's fucked up.

Speaker 3 (26:17):
I mean one of the parts actually felt genuine. Were
certain sections of this where he was like saying like,
I'm I'm I was not supposed to be here tonight,
and the crowd was like, yes you are.

Speaker 2 (26:26):
Yeah he was like no, no, no, really close.

Speaker 3 (26:31):
You know, he was thanking God. I don't know how
genuine that is for him, and how much of that's
political posture.

Speaker 2 (26:36):
Yeah, that I don't necessarily believe that.

Speaker 3 (26:38):
That's just kind of what you have to do.

Speaker 2 (26:39):
He certainly knows that he barely made it out of
that fucking speech.

Speaker 3 (26:45):
Yeah. And he pointed to thessassination attempt as a sign
of how divided this country has been. A very world
trying to find the guy who did this moment, And
he called the Democrats to stop the witch hunts if
they want to unify the country, saying, quote, we must
not demonize political disagreement, and the Democrats should quote stop

(27:06):
weaponizing the Justice Department against Trump and labeling him an
enemy of democracy. So he's saying, the way to actually
unify this country is just to stop stopping bad. Yeah,
stop saying orange man bad. That's really what he was,
That's what he was getting at.

Speaker 2 (27:19):
Well, and I you know, you get if you want
to see the things that you can gain from this
that are useful in how to fight these people. They
are scared of the attacks that portray Trump as an
enemy of democracy. The Project twenty twenty five focus was
hurting Republicans and polling and the fact that the dims
have pulled back maybe not.

Speaker 3 (27:39):
Mentioned in a single speech this week.

Speaker 2 (27:40):
Yeah, nobody talked up twenty twenty five. You know, even
the Heritage Foundation people were notably cagier about it than
you might expect in their interviews with the press, because
they do know that it's not a good it's not
great for them to bring up now.

Speaker 3 (27:55):
It's not popular. Yeah, and you know, slowly Trump's speech
got more more Trumpian rights, saying that Democrats are destroying
our country, talking about you know, immigrants invading our country.
As he said, he said there word invasion many many times. Yeah,
saying that that there that saying that legal immigrants are

(28:15):
killing hundreds of thousands of people a year.

Speaker 2 (28:18):
Yeah, it's the fentanyl thing. It's even though ninety fyl
is brought into US sports of entry by US citizens. Yeah,
that line actually was one of the through lines. That
was almost every day of this I heard someone mention
that we've lost as many or more Americans to fentanyl
as we did in World War Two. At one point
it might have been in Trump's speech. It was even

(28:40):
framed as like more people have died from fentanyl than
died in World War Two, and like, well, no, no, no, lot,
a lot of people died in World War two, just
not that many Americans. Really.

Speaker 3 (28:51):
Yeah, speaking of World War two era Germany in Trump's
little section, we sure did get a mention there. In
Trump's little section about inflation, he gave a fascinating comment, yeah, saying, quote,
you can go back to Germany one hundred years ago
unquote to see the negative effects of inflation, yea, pointing

(29:11):
to like fin Maar era Germany.

Speaker 2 (29:13):
Yeah, yeah, you're talking about Vymar. He's talking about like
what immediately preceded the Nazis coming to power.

Speaker 3 (29:19):
Yeah, and and but like also framing it is like
I'll be the one to get us out of inflation,
which is very similar messaging as the fascist movements did,
saying to Germany that was in you know, in a
real economic issue, we will be the ones to fix
this through through nationalism, closing our borders through putting Germany first,

(29:40):
like that is, it's, it's it was. It was a
very very odd comparison for Trump to make. I don't
know how well he thought through that. I don't believe
that was this was like an intentional code admits it didn't.

Speaker 2 (29:49):
It didn't seem like.

Speaker 3 (29:50):
I don't think Trump works that way.

Speaker 2 (29:51):
Yeah, he definitely does have teleprompters sometimes, but he also
he is like a good public speaker. He doesn't just
stick religious to it, you know, And that did strike
me as a line that may have just come right
out of the heart.

Speaker 3 (30:05):
Now, he had a few other interesting things in the economy.
He was talking a lot about increasing car manufacturing jobs,
including saying the leader of the United Autoworkers should be
fired and promising to put tariffs of one hundred to
two hundred percent on all foreign made cars, which would
I'm sure do some real.

Speaker 2 (30:25):
Stuck up on your toyotas now, folks, well they make
a lot of them in the US.

Speaker 3 (30:28):
I'm sure that would really help the economy.

Speaker 2 (30:30):
Yeah, yeah, which is like, I mean, part of the
there's a lot to say about that. One thing that's interesting,
someone had told you because you were the first person
to bring this up to me. There were strong rumors
that really a midday before the speech started percolating that
Elon Musk was going to show up and introduce or
introduce people.

Speaker 3 (30:49):
I heard this from like Thursday morning.

Speaker 2 (30:53):
Which may mean that they were just getting some bullshit.
It may mean that there were actually talks, right, I'm
sure because Musk has been real like Musk has been
trying do get Trump's attention. Yeah, that's beyond debate.

Speaker 3 (31:03):
He wants Trump on Twitter m hm.

Speaker 2 (31:05):
And he wants Trump. You know. He's he's been making
all these statements about how much money he's going to
donate to Trump and now he's endorsing him. Now, do
I actually think he's gonna give the RNC forty five
million dollars a month? No, he's going to find some
bullshit way he's gonna give him something. But he's gonna fight.
He's he's he never spends gives like that's too much
money for him to want to spend on them, right, Like,

(31:26):
I think he's going to fuck them the way he
fucks everybody over. But it was interesting to me how
much talk there was of him showing up and absolutely
no eel on And in fact, there was a moment
where Trump was like, hey, electric cars are fine for
some things, but like we got to subsidize gas cars.

Speaker 3 (31:42):
Yeah. He talked about, you know, increasing drilling in the
United States and kind of the last big topic that
he went to was the border. He pointed to the
to the little border patrol chart that he looked at
the split second before those shots fired, which saved his life,
So you can thank the borderroll chart for that. He
said that Mexico and South American countries are sending murderers

(32:04):
and people from a sane asylums into the United States.

Speaker 2 (32:07):
It was interesting because Naibukele of El Salvador, it keeps
getting brought up as like a Trumpian figure, is like,
this is the kind of leader Trump wants to be.
Look at how good he's done it, like stopping violent
crime in El Salvador. Trump shat on him. Trump accused
him of sending all of El Salvador's violent criminals and
psychopaths to the United States, which I thought was interesting.

Speaker 3 (32:30):
Actually, was it El Salvador Venezuela.

Speaker 2 (32:32):
Both He brought up both because he also brought up
Venezuela and accused them of doing that, he said El Salvador.
But he also brought up Venezuela and said, maybe next
election will hold the RNC in Venezuela because it's so
peaceful now because they sent all their rapists here.

Speaker 3 (32:44):
Exactly that. Then he had the late great Hannibal Lecter line,
and then immediately afterwards he said that he will enact
the largest deportation program in American history. Yeah, and that's
just what a very beautiful snapshot of the current American politican.

Speaker 2 (33:00):
And it got a great reaction. And I would say
that by far the most aggressive, because he really didn't
play any of that much of the much of if
any radical left stuff. He really even didn't other than
to say that Joe was like a bad president, the
country was in bad shape. He didn't like yell at Democrats.
Much hate was mostly reserved for migrants and immigrants.

Speaker 3 (33:20):
Yes. He closed by saying that we're going to be
building an iron dome in the United States.

Speaker 2 (33:27):
Oh yeah, that curveball.

Speaker 3 (33:29):
Yeah, And then he pivoted to saying that we will
not have men playing in women's sports, which is the
first trans reference.

Speaker 2 (33:36):
In his whole speech, and he just kind of dropped
it and then changed.

Speaker 3 (33:39):
And then he immediately continued to something else, And the
crowd did not react to that nearly as much as
they reacted to any of the other mentions of like
trans people.

Speaker 2 (33:48):
I think because it just kind of he just kind
of threw it out there, but then we're right back to.

Speaker 3 (33:52):
It was almost like a perfunctory line, like knew he.

Speaker 2 (33:54):
Had again and drop a line about because I think
it is perfunctory because again Trump doesn't really care all
that much about the culture, like the social stuff.

Speaker 3 (34:03):
Yeah, and that is That's pretty much what they closed
the speech on. Most mostly on this migrant stuff, this
iron dome thing, and increase increasing the increasing the manufacturing
jobs in the United States, which is you know, a
lot of a lot of what Trump's messaging was back
at twenty sixteen as well.

Speaker 2 (34:21):
So I mean, in a way, it was mostly him
playing the hits. You know, we had the there was
He did bring out Corey Contemporis firefighter's uniform. It was
on stage behind him the whole time. He kissed it.

Speaker 3 (34:35):
At one point walked up to it and I thought
he was gonna going for a hug, and I was like, oh,
that's gonna be weird, and instead he went up behind
and kissed it, which was also weird.

Speaker 2 (34:42):
It kind of did a Joe Biden to the Dead
Man's It was firefighter.

Speaker 3 (34:45):
It was a very Joe Biden.

Speaker 2 (34:47):
And he brought up Corey. He brought also up the
other people who were wounded. He named them all, which
you know, you I makes sense, you have to do it.
He didn't really talk much about Corey beyond that, like
Corey was there as a prop. He kissed it, and
then he.

Speaker 3 (35:01):
Gave a five second moment of silence, a very brief
moment of silence.

Speaker 2 (35:05):
And then they moved on. And when his speech ended
for the night, Garrison and I both saw this was
beautiful moments to share with you, Garrett. You and I
have shared some moments, but this was. This is right
up at the top of the list as all of
the the whole convention, the whole ceiling is balloons, right.
They've got them up there. They have some sort of
system by which like at the end they trigger it

(35:27):
and they all start falling down and they'll fall for
ten fifteen minutes. Like there's a lot of balloons and
it's rigged so that they're and you know, some of
them are red, white and blue. A lot of them
are like gold.

Speaker 3 (35:37):
Huge gold balloons.

Speaker 2 (35:38):
Yeah, and the last sight we get, you know, as
as Trump is on stage with his family, balloons are
showering the crowds everywhere streaming.

Speaker 3 (35:46):
They're celebrating what they see as as an inevitable victory.

Speaker 2 (35:50):
Yeah. Two stage crew guys take Corey's uniform and wheel
it unceremoniously off stage into darkness as quietly wheel its
balloons poured down and everyone dances and cheeers.

Speaker 3 (36:03):
No one, no one noticed.

Speaker 2 (36:05):
We're done. It's like Frank Grime's caskets sinking into the
into the dirt, and the Simpsons like no one sees,
one sees.

Speaker 3 (36:12):
Very unceremoniously, very quietly, very quickly just wheeled off and
what we needed from him as the celebration continues. And
also they spelled his name wrong on the firefighting uniform,
to be it was previously spelled wrong.

Speaker 2 (36:24):
Yeah, yeah, that's I think it was an issue of
when he was a firefighter. They just could only have
so many letters on the jackets. But you know, there
was some talk about that. I have seen a lot
of folks making the comparison to Horst Wessel, who was
a German member of the Brown Shirts who's also a pimp,
who gets got murdered by some communists in retaliation for

(36:45):
acts of violence he had carried out right before the
Third Reich took power, and they they really made a
lot out of his death. He got this massive state funeral,
They had a very popular song about him. He was
kind of he was kind of the individual chosen to
embody all of the guys who died in the street
fights prior to the right of the party. And people

(37:05):
have been comparing Corey to Horst. I get why, because
this is we are watching a fascist party near power here,
and there's clearly some desire in that for Corey to
be that. Horst was the focus of almost I'm not
almost a cult And what I saw here was a perfunctory, Well,

(37:28):
we got to mention this guy. Uh, we got to like,
you know, make a reference to him. But let's let's
get in and out of that. We got to move
on to the meat and potatoes. That's not gonna win us.
And I think what is like the the swing voters
and shit don't care about Corey contemporary right, that's not
gonna that's our base is going to expect us to
say something. It's also just like the thing you do.
This guy got killed at your rally with a bulletmint

(37:50):
for you, you got to bring up something. But then
let's move on. Let's get him out of there, Let's
shove his fucking uniform into the fucking back closet, and uh,
get back to the party, you know. And that is
different from how the Nazis handled horsed And I think
that difference maybe it signals a real difference in the
structure of American fascism, you know, and how it inhabits

(38:12):
a party, or maybe it's just a measure of we're
not all fully bought in on this to the extent
in the same way that the Nazis were, right like,
we really are trying to just get a lot of
people on board to vote for us, and we don't
want to get too weird with it. We don't want
to have a big cult for Corey at the RNC,
the big religious state. That's got to be off putting

(38:33):
to Americans. So let's we'll kiss the hat people like firefighters,
shove it back. That's how I took that.

Speaker 3 (38:40):
There's two other things I want to mention I've had JD.
Vance's hype song stuck in my head. Boy, yeah, because
they just kept playing it at that convention, and it's
an interesting song. It has it has a good beat.
It for most of the song, it's talking about how,
you know, we spend all this time trying to like
liberate other countries, right, and maybe actually we're the ones

(39:03):
that need to be liberated. Maybe maybe America actually needs
to be saved. Maybe we aren't as free as what
we would think. And it has a line about like
getting out of Iraq.

Speaker 2 (39:13):
We got to get out of we got to get
out of Iraq, take our country back and put America first.

Speaker 3 (39:18):
And I mean that is the point that where they
lose me. Obviously, it's still it's still interesting for one
of them, Like for the Vice President's song at the
RNC to be anti Iraqs. I'm like, hey, there there
were people telling you back then not to do Iraq
and you really wanted to.

Speaker 2 (39:34):
We heard it for the first time on Monday when
Vance got officially announced as the nominee, and I kind
of wondered, then, if like is this a fuck up?
Was like somebody they were like, oh, there's a Merle
Haggard song about America first, let's throw that in there,
and then realized, oh no, there's we can't have that.
We're the party who did the Iraq stuff. But it
kept coming up, man kept being played. So it's very intentional, clearly.

Speaker 3 (39:54):
And we were talking last night about this and like
how how this is how these tips sort of nationalist
projects always work. And we we've seen more America first,
like that, that exact phrase used at this convention way
more than any any previous one. Trump said it a
few times. A lot of speakers have been saying it,
just like we need to put America first. And yeah,

(40:16):
specifically in this song, you know, it has it has
this kind of populist bent that then veers very hard nationalists,
which I'm sure we're all familiar with as a political tendency.
But I've just thought I found that to be the
most interesting part is because for like the majority of
that song, I'm like, yes, absolutely, I agree. And then
and and then they say the America first line, and

(40:37):
it's like, oh, that is not that is not what
we're talking about. It's yeah, and I just know it's
it's it's been something I've been thinking about and I'm
sure we'll want I'm sure we'll do some more deep
dives on Vance in the coming weeks, since he's a
little bit, you know, less well known to many of you,
I assume. And the the last thing I kind of
want to mention is that yesterday, right before Trump's speech,

(40:59):
I was getting some work done and I happened to
be sitting about ten feet away from Ted Cruz, who
was who is talking on air about his thoughts on
like both this this convention and this election in general.
And he said a few interesting things that I half
heard that I that I quickly just scribbled down on
a notebook. He said that, you know this, this convention

(41:22):
already feels like a celebration, right, this already feels like
like we've kind of won. But he warned Republicans to
be scared of over confidence. He said that we're kind
of acting like how the Democrats were acting in twenty sixteen.

Speaker 2 (41:39):
I have been saying that all week.

Speaker 3 (41:41):
Yeah, and that's that's what Ted Cruz was saying. Yeah.
He thinks that that that Biden is not going to
be the candidate, that someone else is going to come
into place.

Speaker 4 (41:48):
Now.

Speaker 3 (41:48):
He believes that that's going to be Michelle Obama, which
is believable in an unhinged opinions.

Speaker 2 (41:53):
Unbelievable because like, do I think Michelle Obama would have
a decent shot at winning the presidency in this election?
And sure, do I think Michelle Obama wants to go
anywhere near the White House again in her life?

Speaker 3 (42:03):
Now?

Speaker 2 (42:04):
Absolute, it's like a nightmare. She's making movies, they're produced,
they're in Hollywood. You're doing the thing people when.

Speaker 3 (42:10):
They're doing what Ted Cruz wants to do.

Speaker 2 (42:12):
When people are allowed to make big Hollywood movies, they
don't want to get into politics for a long time.
That's how we avoided having fascists and power in this
country and like like direct power, like like Trump type
kind of fascists.

Speaker 3 (42:27):
We're very lucky that Clint Eastwood just makes movies and
doesn't do.

Speaker 2 (42:30):
Are the people who would be the best we have?
You know, you have fascists like stuck inside of the bureaucracy,
But the people who could really have the potential charisma
to be populist leaders wind up becoming movie stars. Tom
Cruise could have been a president. Oh he's he's got
what it takes, but he decided to devote all of
that manic kind of charisma energy into climbing the bersh Khalifa.

(42:54):
And that's part of the genius of the American system.

Speaker 3 (42:58):
And I mean, guess lastly, Milwaukee was lovely. All the
food service workers Milwaukee's great. Even the poor people who
were forced to work at the convention center consistently nice,
did a great job. And there's there's one one anecdote
that Robert should mention.

Speaker 2 (43:15):
Just regardless of a favorite part of the convention, some
of the.

Speaker 3 (43:18):
Very fine people here in Milwaukee.

Speaker 2 (43:21):
I've gotten shouted my my occasional enemy, well always enemy,
but occasionally I remember that he exists. Andy No made
a series of posts about how there was a dangerous
Antifa terrorist at the convention and like clipped a couple
of posts of mine out of context like he always does,

(43:42):
and was like, you know, people in his in his
mentions were tagging the Secret Service.

Speaker 3 (43:48):
In THEBN it serves Laura Lumer.

Speaker 2 (43:50):
I continued to repeatedly enter the r n C. I
went through. God, I lost count of how many times
I went through Secret Service checkpoints. We snuck into the
hair Ridage Foundation party. None of it mattered. The only
people at the show who recognized me were like technical
folks for the different radio. I had a couple of
different people who were carrying booms carrying cameras who like referenced,

(44:14):
like recognized me and shouted me out, which I felt
good about. What I felt best about is as you
and I were walking to the stadium to see the speech,
we see a forklift driving down the street in the
middle of this one of the crowded streets. Yeah, which
is kind of crazy. It's weird. I've never actually seen
a construction vehicle driving around inside the during like the

(44:34):
convention hours, so that was weird. And as we're like
watching this thing, like I honestly wondered, like, should I
like get a footage of this? That's kind of wild looking?
As were as we see it like kind of coming
up next to us, the driver leans out of the
side of the vehicle and he is a beautiful man
covered in tattoos, huge nos ring and he's like.

Speaker 3 (44:55):
Hey, Roberts, we have the demographic.

Speaker 2 (45:01):
Nothing has ever made me so certain that we're doing
the right thing with our lives. We're reaching the people
we need to be reaching.

Speaker 3 (45:07):
You know, we forklift certified soldiers out there so Forklift Nation.

Speaker 2 (45:14):
Thank you for listening to it could happen here.

Speaker 3 (45:17):
We do this for you.

Speaker 2 (45:18):
We do this for you. We know you have our
backs and we have your back.

Speaker 3 (45:24):
Stay save everybody.

Speaker 2 (45:25):
Yeah, God bless.

Speaker 5 (45:39):
Hello, Welcome to It could happen here? Another food episode.
How did we get here today? We're talking about asparagus.
Why you might ask, once again, you can blame James
Stout Hi James.

Speaker 4 (45:52):
Hi, Cheren. I'm happy to be blamed. I take responsibility
for asparagus.

Speaker 5 (45:58):
Why did you want me to talk about asparagus?

Speaker 4 (46:01):
Well, it's because Shereen I grew up in the vyl
Aviv Sham. The vyl Aviv Sham, if people aren't familiar,
is an area in the middle of England where asparagus
has grown heavily. In fact, there's a protected origin, so
you could only call it vel Aviv Shum asparagus if
it comes. Yeah, there was a big asparagus auction that
used to happen the first the first so around it's

(46:22):
called grass and not asparagus. Right, Where's I'll get into that? Yeah, good, good,
excited to Then it's so do you know how many
how many spears are in a round?

Speaker 2 (46:32):
Sreen.

Speaker 5 (46:34):
No, let's say no.

Speaker 4 (46:36):
Okay, it's a gross, a gross of spears, so it gross.
How many do you know how many in a gross? No,
it is one hundred and forty four. It's twelve times twelve.

Speaker 6 (46:49):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (46:50):
So there's a pub called the Round of Grass. We
scot a lot. When I was younger, I used to work.
If anyone knows it high maybe you probably know me.
It's small fan to my mum, who is probably the
only person I used to work to stand the road
from there at a tomato like a big tomato greenhouse.

Speaker 5 (47:12):
You used to work at a tomato greenhouse.

Speaker 4 (47:14):
Yep, yep, pack up the tomatoes. Slap a label on
that bad boy, sat. It's such a crap job, Like
I mean, it doesn't say no disrespect if you work
in the tomato greenhouse and that's what you enjoy, Like,
that's great, Like I love to grow a tomato. That
job was just not I didn't like it. The same
thing every day.

Speaker 5 (47:32):
Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. Well, well, today is not
a tomato episode. Today is an asparagus episode. Let's just
get into it. I want you to talk more about
your hometown, but I'm gonna sprinkle it in here and there.
Just to make these more interesting, Let's just get into
the nitty gritty of what asparagus is. Apparently, the asparagus
is a member of the lily family. The plant is

(47:54):
made up of the top, which is the fern, the
crowns which are the buds, and then the roots. All
three of these parts are vital to a productive asparagus plant.
The fern is known as the factory, which through photosynthesis,
produces food sorted in the crown and their roots below ground.
The number of vigorous spears in the spring depends on

(48:15):
the amount of food produced and stored in the crown
during the preceding summer and fall. Producing a good crop
of fern is necessary for ensuring a good crop of
spears the following spring. It's important not to cut the
old fern at the end of the season until it
is completely dead, and the best time to remove old
fern is in the spring, since valuable food and nutrients

(48:37):
move during the autumn months from the dying fern to
the crown. Fascinating, Yeah, maybe you're wondering is there a
nutritional value? Yes, of course it's a vegetable, But one
cup of asparagus has no fat and only two grays
of sugar and three milligrams of salt. Apparently, it's known
as one of the most nutritionally balanced vegetables ever, a

(48:59):
lot of fiber, and it contains no cholesterol, very low
in sodium, as I said, a good source of folic acid, potassium,
as well as vitamin's A A six and vitamin C. Wowie, Yeah,
only the young shoots of asparagus are eaten. Fun fact.
There's also an amino acid called asparagene, and this gets
its name from asparagus because the asparagus plant is rich

(49:21):
in this compound. Asparagene is also commonly found fun fact
in French fries and potatoes, which are potatoes and fries
are the same. There are over three hundred known varieties
of asparagus, and the varieties most widely seen in the
United States include the white variety, which is preferred in Europe.

(49:42):
I'll get into this later, but apparently chefs in Europe
only usually use white James.

Speaker 4 (49:49):
Yeah, well that's the mainland Europe. Maybe now that we've exited, obviously,
we can be proud of our green asparagus. I've not
enjoyed white asparagus. I think it lacks fresh, the fresh flavor.

Speaker 5 (50:03):
There's a reason for that. There's a reason for that.

Speaker 4 (50:05):
Yeah, they pile up the soil, right, so yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 (50:08):
Yeah, well spoiler alert, I was going to call it
is very fascinating that they prefer to do that, though,
But regardless, the three varieties in the United States include
the white one, and these sunlight deprived stocks are a
little milder and more delicate. It's difficult to find these
fresh in the US, but they are widely available canned

(50:32):
or in jars.

Speaker 4 (50:33):
They don't want to be eating a sparis in a
can or a jar, though.

Speaker 5 (50:36):
I mean, you don't want to be eating most things
in a canna a jar.

Speaker 4 (50:40):
That's pretic. A sardine if you're a person who eats
sardines very good in a.

Speaker 5 (50:43):
Can, I'm not going to do a hardy an episode.

Speaker 4 (50:47):
That could be a really interesting episode. I used to
live in a place where they had a protected origin
for those as well.

Speaker 5 (50:52):
You know, after doing sea your Chins, I was glad
to do asparagus because asparagus, says, are not little think things.
I'm not trying to be annoying, but I think it's
hard for me to talk about things like eating.

Speaker 4 (51:06):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 (51:08):
About them because they are food, but they're not my
first choice. So I'm glad to be talking about a
plant today. I don't find asparagus cute, so maybe it's
easier for me to eat them. That's that's just my
own bias.

Speaker 4 (51:21):
Yeah, I didn't derail your episode. I've been reminded that
I had my twenty first birthday party at one of
the pubs at Auctions. The asparagus. Wow, tidbit.

Speaker 5 (51:32):
I love some James Stout Loore.

Speaker 4 (51:35):
Forget in the varn, in the varn at the fleece
at Breadforton. The other one, of course, is around the
grass and batsy.

Speaker 5 (51:41):
Wow, fascinating. Your life continues to be fascinating.

Speaker 4 (51:47):
That's extremely fucking mundane.

Speaker 5 (51:50):
It's fucking weird in a good way. But sure they're
the other variety, the violet or purple kind of asparagus.
This one is commonly found in England and Italy and
it has a very substantial stock. And then is the
green asparagus, which is the most widely known kind of asparagus,
because most American asparagus is of this variety, and it
ranges from pencil thin to very thick. They describe it

(52:13):
as the size of your thumb, but I think this
is relative, depending on how big your thumb is. And
then there's also wild asparagus, and these asparagus grow in
wild areas. It's mostly found in Europe or like on
the coastline somewhere, and you'll most likely have to hunt
down your own because it's rarely available fresh in markets
except for in Italy and the south of France.

Speaker 4 (52:34):
No, wild asparagus is great, it's going to be. Uh,
you do have to be as with anything that you're
taking out of the out of the wild areas. You
do want to be careful that you're getting wild asparagus.
We are a couple of things because if you confuse
it with something else, oh, I mean yeah you can
can Yeah, you can get yourself. I'm trying to remember.

Speaker 5 (52:54):
Yeah, don't be like into the wild out here, like yeah.

Speaker 4 (52:56):
Yes, yeah, don't into the world yourself with a world asparagus.
Samfa is another delicious vegetable. It's a bit like I
think it's a relative of asparagus. It's like sea asparagus
s a m p h ire.

Speaker 5 (53:09):
Wow, see asparagus.

Speaker 4 (53:11):
Yeah, so many little Yeah, fascinating. It's I think it's
a maybe it's not a relative. Maybe it's just a
like a seaweed. It's pretty good if you get it.
That's one you can forage pretty easily. Nearly all seaweeds edible,
So you know, if you're out and about.

Speaker 5 (53:27):
Good source of iodine, I'm sure.

Speaker 4 (53:29):
Yeah. Well yeah, But.

Speaker 5 (53:31):
As with any plant, James, asparagus has its own ideas.

Speaker 3 (53:34):
It's called sea beans.

Speaker 4 (53:35):
Well, sorry, I'm just sorry, ten, I've ruined your episode
sea beans? No, yes, what fucking Americans call it? What
a stupid name?

Speaker 5 (53:43):
I mean, you do ruin moost things?

Speaker 4 (53:46):
Yeah, Like, I don't know. It's a little two too straightforward.
It's literally mentioned in king Lear Like, why do you
have to change it? Shakespearean vegetable?

Speaker 5 (53:55):
M Well, today is about asparagus. Today, we're talking about asparagus.
A sea bean maybe next time. But James, as with
any plant, the asparagus has its own ideal growing conditions.
So let's get into that. Where is an ideal growing
condition for an asparagus? A good amount of sun is ideal.
Asparagus needs at least eight hours of sun per day.

(54:17):
And since asparagus is a long lived perennial plant. It
should not be planted where trees or tall shrubs might
eventually shade the plants or compete for nutrients and water.
When it comes to the soil, the crown and root
system can grow to a large size, which can be
roughly five to six feet in diameter and ten to
fifteen feet deep. Therefore, when possible, you should select a

(54:39):
soil that is loose, deep, well drained, and fertile. On
sites with poor soil, incorporate manure and compost into the
soil and plant until under two successive cover crops the
season before you plant your asparagus, and you should be
just fine. Asparagus is planted in the spring. The simplest
method is to plant one year old crowns and you

(55:01):
lay down the ground soil prior to growing asparagus for
the first time. And even though the young crown will
appear to be a lifeless mass of roots, it will
begin to send up small green shoots shortly after planting,
so as I mentioned, asparagus is planted in the spring,
but it's also one of the very first crops harvested
during the spring season, and that means metaphorically, It represents

(55:22):
the transition from the frozen winter months and its emphasis
on root vegetables to the abundance and newness of spring. Yeah,
asparagus for farmers can mean even more. Farmer Lee Jones
from The Chef's Garden says quote, the farmer is an
eternal optimist, always hoping that next year will be the year,

(55:45):
the year when rain falls and exactly the right amounts
at exactly the right times, that it's never too hot
and never too cold, and the weather is exactly what
we might wish. No season is ever perfect, of course,
but try telling that to a farmer as he or
she sits in front of a cozy fireplace in the wintertime,
feet propped up, looking through seed catalogs and dreaming of spring.

(56:08):
Winter refreshes us, and asparagus represents the hope of renewal
and the optimism of what spring might bring. When it's
time to begin harvesting asparagus, farmers smell the earth again,
see the earthworms, and listen once again to the kill
deer in the blackbirds. This portent of spring is a

(56:29):
welcome celebration. Asparagus is a recurrent affirmation that winter is
over and delicious treasures from the field are eminent. This
man loves asparagus.

Speaker 4 (56:41):
Yeah, that is farmers. Apparently it's not my recollection of winter.
This man has never been very wet, very cold.

Speaker 5 (56:49):
I suppose not.

Speaker 4 (56:50):
Yeah, yeah, doing a Christmas lamming.

Speaker 5 (56:54):
I suppose you can think of asparagus as a very
patient vegetable. It rests quietly underground, absorbing nutrients from the
soil and remaining underground during the freezing winter months before
it begins to push through the soil when it's warm
in the springtime, and this again signals the start of
the spring season. In nineteen fifty six, The New York

(57:14):
Times published an article calling asparagus the healthy quote spring
tonic for weary appetites. I just thought it was a
fun facts. That's that's all for that. Asparagus can grow
quite fast too. You can cut asparagus in the morning
and it just keeps growing. And here's a fun fact
for you. In ideal conditions, asparagus can grow ten inches

(57:35):
in a twenty four hour period.

Speaker 4 (57:37):
Yeah, it's crazy, that's fast. It takes a long time
to get ready, right, it takes three years and then
it just.

Speaker 5 (57:42):
Yeah, I mean, look, it's definitely an investment of time
for it to grow that way. But it sounds like
it's worth it if you love asparagus, like farmer le
Jones up there.

Speaker 4 (57:51):
Yeah he does, do yount another little vale of eves
in factoid. Please The church in Bredfton has a stained
glass window which is a glass of asparagus.

Speaker 7 (58:01):
No, it doesn't.

Speaker 4 (58:01):
It's a depiction of asparagus. I will find it for you.

Speaker 5 (58:04):
Sure like asparagus, says Jesus.

Speaker 4 (58:07):
No, it's just asparagus in the window. Oh like, it's
not how it is.

Speaker 5 (58:11):
Not less weird. I don't know if that's less weirder
or not.

Speaker 4 (58:14):
But I'm just gotta find it for you here. Well
it's is grass underneath. I'll just drop it in the chat.
Get a live react.

Speaker 3 (58:22):
No.

Speaker 5 (58:23):
Yeah, I had a little twine wrapped around it too.

Speaker 4 (58:28):
Oh yeah, yeah, Well that's how you do a round
of grass. Yeah, you do them in dozens, right, and
then a dozen dozen you wrap around.

Speaker 5 (58:33):
That's that's a stained glass depiction of asparagus.

Speaker 4 (58:38):
Okay, yeahparagus is next to godliness.

Speaker 5 (58:41):
Oh I'm getting into why that might be the case.
So just to reiterate how much patience and time you yourself
need if you do want to plant asparagus, because although
green asparagus is typically what's seen in grocery stores, it
comes in all the colors that we said, But no
matter what it is, it's important to protect the strength

(59:02):
of the root or else it won't succeed in growing.
And this is how gentle you need to be. First,
you plant the three year old roots, and if the
asparagus root is in its first year in growth, which
is really then it's fourth, you should only pick it
for one week because you don't want to zap the
root strength. Then after two years, which would be really
its fifth, you pick it only for two weeks. By

(59:24):
the time it's four years old, which yes means that's
a seven year total, then you can harvest it for
longer amounts of time a good plant though, after all,
this process can last up to twenty years, so it's
important to let the young ones build up strength for
the future. We mentioned this before James gave it away.
But in Europe chefs almost always use the white asparagus,

(59:46):
rarely the green ones, and this is because the white
asparagus beautifully offers up the luscious notes apparently of corn
and sweet cabbage, but European farmers. The reason why this
is is that they mound and pack soil over the
asparagus plants to blow the chlorophyll process, and this is
the process that ends up creating the white color when
you block it. And these plants need to push hard

(01:00:08):
through the soil and because of that, they end up
with tough outer skins that need to be peeled off,
which is not the case with the green variety. And
then this adds labor like expenses and time into the
mix of harvesting it. And a lot of people think
that this results in the most nutritional part of the
vegetable being thrown away.

Speaker 4 (01:00:26):
So why, yeah, why you dan't get It's one of
the things that wrong about.

Speaker 5 (01:00:32):
Here are some more fun facts. Chefs say that to
enjoy the bright green flavor of asparagus, you salt your
water before blanching, and then, since the ends of asparagus
are extremely tough, the best way to prepare the asparagus
is a snap the ends off, which you probably already know,
but you usually can find a slight bend where it
can be broken off and this will preserve the most

(01:00:53):
asparagus possible.

Speaker 4 (01:00:55):
You want to have a good snap though. If it's
like it is fun.

Speaker 5 (01:00:59):
When that happens, I like like a good satisfying snap sound.

Speaker 4 (01:01:02):
Yeah, that's when you know it's a fresh one. If
it's if it's got like a squeeze. If it was floppy,
then it's probably it's been out for too long. You
have to eat it very fresh. It's very important. They
would drive out to London, get me in a really
early morning, drive up to London and sell it to
look at London people, of which I'm not one, and
then they would have there it's very luxury vegetable.

Speaker 5 (01:01:24):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (01:01:24):
Yeah, it is not a cheap vegetable.

Speaker 5 (01:01:27):
I'm going to get into the royalty of this vegetable
that has been called the King of vegetables. But first
we're going to take a break. So hm, go grab
some asparagus and we'll be right back. And we're back,

(01:01:52):
let's talk about some history of asparagus. The exact origins
of asparagus are hard to pinpoint, although it is known
to the eastern Mediterranean and parts of Asia. Asparagus can
be found naturalized in many parts of the world today,
and it is unclear exactly when it was naturalized how
long the plant has been used as a medicinal vegetable

(01:02:12):
is also uncertain, but it was known and highly prized
by the Romans since at least two hundred BC. The
Romans were apparently very knowledgeable about the difference in quality
and the difference in varieties that they experimented with, and
they knew the best places to grow the crop. The
most popular way that the Romans enjoyed to prepare their
asparagus was to pick it, let it dry, and then

(01:02:33):
when they wanted to eat it, they would simply cook
it for a few minutes. Ancient royalty seemed fascinated with asparagus.
Roman emperor Caesar Augustus was said to have organized elite
military units to search out this vegetable. He would then
locate the fastest runners to take the fresh asparagus spears
into the frozen alps for storage purposes. Ancient Greeks meanwhile

(01:02:56):
harvested wild asparagus and connected this vegetable to their goddess
of life of Aphrodite. Numerous other cultures have also considered
this freshly sprouted asparagus a symbol of fertility, and so
the history of asparagus goes back a very long long way,
and speaking of the Greeks. The derivation of the word
asparagus also gives us some idea of its early history.

(01:03:19):
So asparagus was first cultivated some people think around twenty
five hundred years ago in Greece, and this is significant
because the word asparagus is a Greek word which means
stock or shoot, and so it makes sense that the
word is rooted in ancient Greek. But that word in
ancient Greek is actually aspharagos, and it can be identified
in various literature with two meanings. The first is found

(01:03:41):
in Homer's Iliad, and it is used in this context
to mean throat or gullet. The second place it's found,
it's referred to as the edible shoots of stone or spirite.
The Greeks believed asparagus was an herbal medicine, which, among
other things, would cure toothaches and prevent beastings. We have
seen reference to the fact that at one point this

(01:04:01):
Greek word refer to the young edible shoots of any
plant that shoots up from the earth, but we cannot
verify this fact. So maybe in the area of ancient
Greece known as Biotia, historians say that quote. After veiling
the bride, they would put on her head a chaplet
of asparagus. For this plant yields the finest flavored fruit

(01:04:23):
from the roughest thorns. So the bride will provide him
who does not run away or feel annoyed at her
first display of peevishness or unpleasantness, a docile and sweet
life together.

Speaker 4 (01:04:37):
Okay, Yeah, feminism alive. Well, yeah, I didn't know I
was going to be suggesting an anti woke vegetable.

Speaker 5 (01:04:48):
I mean, it's a little bit of Returney.

Speaker 4 (01:04:55):
You don't have to be anti woke asparagus.

Speaker 5 (01:04:57):
No, you don't. You don't. Now, it's it's come a
long way.

Speaker 4 (01:04:59):
It's come.

Speaker 5 (01:05:02):
Let's take back asparagus.

Speaker 4 (01:05:05):
We'll start there. It's like you have small steps.

Speaker 5 (01:05:09):
Other ancient cultures that apparently were obsessed with asparagus. The
asparagus plant appeared in an Egyptian freeze about five thousand
years ago, with Queen Nefertidi allegedly an asparagus fan. Archaeologists
found traces of asparagus on dishware when they were excavating
the Pyramid of Sakara, along with other coveted foods like

(01:05:29):
figs and melons. Apparently, in the Egyptian culture, this vegtiable
was considered sacred and use in religious ceremonies, and then
in ancient China, honored guests were treated upon their arrivals
with an asparagus foot bath.

Speaker 3 (01:05:46):
Don't either.

Speaker 5 (01:05:48):
Its uses are renowned and wide. About two thousand years ago,
a poet in Latin language prose writer and Platonist philosopher
named a Pelais fell in love with a well the
widow named Pundentilla. Knowing he needed to pull out all
the stops to get her, he wooed her with a
special dish that contained asparagus along with crabtails, fish eggs,

(01:06:11):
bird's tongue, and dove blood. He was accused of using
magic charms to win her heart, and even though he
successfully defended himself against his accusations, through this story we
can clearly see there is certainly something magical about asparagus.

Speaker 4 (01:06:27):
Yeah, I'm concerned about crabtail.

Speaker 3 (01:06:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:06:31):
As I read that, I was like, as I read that,
I was like, that's not a thing, But maybe it
used to be. You know it, I'll be my next episode. Yeah,
maybe that, maybe that's the case. Basically, a seafood little
guy with fish eggs and crab also bird's tongue and

(01:06:54):
dove blood.

Speaker 4 (01:06:54):
Yeah, that's a bit weighed. He loves me on that,
to be honest.

Speaker 5 (01:06:57):
Yeah, romantic.

Speaker 4 (01:06:58):
Yeah, I've assumed. Coming to the asparagus recipe section, not
yet later in the podcast, I will let you proceed.

Speaker 5 (01:07:06):
Let me just assume through the rest of us really quick.
When Emperor Charles the fifth of the powerful Habsburg Empire,
decided to visit Rome, and he was live between fifteen
hundred and fifteen fifty eight, he visited Rome without warning
any one of his arrival. A sense of panic ensued
because the emperor had arrived during a time of fasting.

(01:07:28):
One clever cardinal sent cooks to work in creating three
different asparagus recipes. They set the plates on perfumed cloths
and offered the emperor three exquisite wines. He was said
to praise the delicacies, and he was offered for years
to come. And so for centuries people have talked about asparagus,

(01:07:48):
and they've also included asparagus in their Eastern dinners because
of its fast growth in the spring and how this
can symbolize resurrection. The book quote a Curious History of
Vegetables by Wolf D. Storl has numerous asparagus anecdotes to
enjoy if you're into that sort of thing, and also
contains this quote by modern day plant experts Fritz Martin Engel.

(01:08:09):
And this quote effectively sums up the types of people
who have appreciated asparagus over the centuries. Quote pharaohs, emperors, kings,
generals and great spiritual leaders, princely poets like Gota and
gormands like Brelant severan, all of them ate and eat
asparagus with great enthusiasm. Let's get into the word. As

(01:08:31):
I mentioned earlier, it comes from the Greek word asparagos.
Gos is the end of that. So the word asparagus
was eventually developed into the word asparagus in classical Latin,
but then it was shortened to sparagus without the A
in medieval Latin. According to the World of Wide Words,
it first appeared in English around one thousand a d.

(01:08:51):
And then by the sixteenth century it was commonly referred
to an English as sperrich or sparage. At this point
in time, similar to other English language developments, there was
a reversion back to classical Latin roots that was encouraged
by academics and herbalists, so asparagus came back into use
with the A, but when it came to common use,

(01:09:11):
the A was still dropped, and people called it asparagus, sparrograss, sparrowgrass,
and then also just grass, which was another shortening that
people still use today. After the demise of the Roman Empire,
little is heard of regarding the history of asparagus for
a while, but evidence suggests that asparagus was being grown
in French monasteries in fourteen fifty nine, but then it's

(01:09:32):
unheard of in England or Germany until the mid fifteen hundreds.
By the sixteenth century, asparagus starts to appear in history
books again, where a gained popularity in France and England.
From there, the early colonists brought it to America. The
French were the main exports of the crop at the time,
and if you wanted to please the Son King aka

(01:09:53):
King Louis the fourteenth of France, you can bring his
second wife, Madame de Matin sorry a new asparagus recipe,
and apparently that was very pleasing to him. She gathered
them into a book and asparagus soup a la matinan
is still prized today. Asparagus is also because of this

(01:10:13):
called food of the Kings, and kinglu With the fourteenth
was so fond of asparagus that he ordered special greenhouses
built so we can enjoy asparagus all year round.

Speaker 4 (01:10:24):
Me and Louis the fourteenth just cometic on how me
and Louis the fourteenth. Yeah, same dude, many ways love
get asparagus.

Speaker 5 (01:10:31):
Res Oh you were like handshaking yourself.

Speaker 4 (01:10:35):
Yeah, I did not catch that. Yeah, got it.

Speaker 5 (01:10:37):
The medicinal virtues that are attributed to asparagus are a
wide range. The roots, sprouts, and seeds were used as medicine.
The fresh roots are a diuretic. A syrup made from
the young shoots, and an extract of the roots has
been recommended as a sedative in heart issues. Among Greeks
and Romans. It is one of the oldest and most

(01:10:58):
valued medicines. It was believed that if a person anointed
himself with a liniment or liquid medicine made of asparagus
and oil, that bees would not approach or sting him.
I mentioned this kind of briefly earlier, but that's.

Speaker 2 (01:11:12):
How you do it.

Speaker 5 (01:11:12):
Don't get stung by a bee, coat yourself with asparagus juice.
It was also believed that if the root is put
on a tooth that aches violently, it causes it to
fall out without any pain if you want that to happen.
But how did the asparagus cross the Atlantic? There is
little evidence of when exactly asparagus migrate over to the Americas,
and again it's assumed that settlers brought it over along

(01:11:34):
with other vegetables at the time. It's believed that in
the seventeen hundreds it was planted initially in New England,
and then by the eighteen fifties it had found its
way to North California. There is early evidence, based on
seed catalogs, of the crop being sold on a commercial
level in the early eighteenth century in eastern parts of
the country. While asparagus, as we mentioned earlier is a

(01:11:56):
thing and it's seen as early as the nineteenth century,
it can be growing along the East Coast in scattered
locations and across temperate North America, and apparently thirty six
states have reported to have wild asparagus. Another kingly reference
of asparagus is apparently in Germany. Asparagus was called Spargl.
Spargol took cold in Germany around Stuttgart in the sixteenth century,

(01:12:19):
and around the same time it was already being taking
off from the UK. Initially, it was grown exclusively for
the royal court, earning its nickname connexumus muse. Connexum muse
it basically means royal vegetable. And there are two primary
growing regions in Germany where asparagus is in abundance. One

(01:12:43):
of them is Schwitzwingen and it's where Karl Theodore, Prince elector,
started a green asparagus growing competition among the princes in
the seventeenth century, and then the other region, Schrobenhausen. It's
also steeped in asparagus history and houses the European Asparagus Museum.
That's a thing, an asparagus museum. You know what else

(01:13:08):
might have a museum. All of these ads one day
probably not buy what's in city, dads, and we're back, Okay, James.

Speaker 4 (01:13:26):
I do think it's.

Speaker 5 (01:13:27):
Fairly interesting that there's an asparagus museum in Europe. But
I also think it's interesting that you literally grew up
in a town that have an asparagus mascot can you
please explain this to me as someone who does not
know what that means?

Speaker 4 (01:13:41):
I can I can explain a little bit of the
asparagus mascot. So I live in at Evesham when I
grew up. Evesham of course give its name to the
veyl Avivsham, which is the area where asparagus. It was
actually the last British product to get a protected origin
status from the European Union before Britain terminally fucked its

(01:14:04):
economy by leaving the European Union. And so it's this
area around the velevition. You can't call it relevition asparagus
unless from Elvisham. I've just learned that the little purple
tips on the spears, that's not normal. Apparently that's just
an evel Aviv Sham.

Speaker 5 (01:14:18):
So that's a place. But I understand it's BRITI that's.

Speaker 4 (01:14:21):
Why it's in Worcestershire. So not not made up, you
just uh, just it's Worcestershire. By the way, is how
you pronounce Workshire. No people fucking But it's one of
those words like it is.

Speaker 5 (01:14:36):
I didn't actually think that was what it was called,
but I would actually maybe mispronounce.

Speaker 7 (01:14:41):
Probably.

Speaker 4 (01:14:42):
Yeah, it seems like one of those words that really
flummocks is the American mind. So yeah, I grew up
nevel Avievsham and in Develovievshim we grow a lot of
asparagus and very proud of it. So we have an
asparagus festival if you want to get really like hokey
and English, which people in England do be loving to do,
especially people of a certain ethnicity that like, do you

(01:15:05):
generally pick asparagus from Saint George's Day to Midsummer's Day?

Speaker 3 (01:15:09):
Right?

Speaker 4 (01:15:10):
Saint George is the patrons of England and Catalonia. So
if you want to get really sort of parochial about it,
you can get a little nationalistic on the asparagus. I
think most people don't. But it started in Evesham. Evesham
used to have an asparagus festival. We have little mascot
right dressed as and asparagus as.

Speaker 5 (01:15:27):
You do, like literally a man in an asparagus outfit,
like walking around.

Speaker 4 (01:15:33):
Yeah. So there have been two generations. The first one
I think we've mentioned the purple tips and that it
just looks like a dick. He looked a lot like
a day he looked like a ganger and us penis, I.

Speaker 5 (01:15:46):
Mean fertility was known for that.

Speaker 4 (01:15:49):
Yeah, this one didn't look fertile. This one look best avoided.
If I'm honest, I looked like they retired him in
two thousand and they and we're faced in with gusty
asparagus man who, if I mines, doesn't look as asparagusy
because they've given him sort of a flower tip, like.

Speaker 5 (01:16:08):
A broccoli looking thing.

Speaker 4 (01:16:10):
Yeah, it looks a bit like a wheat, kind of weedy,
kind of mapley. It's not full asparagus. There's also an
asparagus fairy. I've seen. I've not personally come across the
asparagus fairy, but I've seen that into fairy. Yeah, you
want to let me disdrop this in the Yeah, he
told me about the fucking fairy. It's just a non
stop learning journey for hery.

Speaker 5 (01:16:31):
Insane first the stained glass, but I still can throughout
the thing.

Speaker 4 (01:16:37):
Wow, yeah y'all what? Yeah, Well, maybe we'll make this
the the.

Speaker 3 (01:16:44):
Image for the image.

Speaker 5 (01:16:46):
This is a great image.

Speaker 4 (01:16:47):
It's a classic image. Yes, you've got a man dressed
as King Saint George, not King George.

Speaker 5 (01:16:51):
Different faces onto that.

Speaker 4 (01:16:54):
Yeah, that would be great it it'll be highly entertaining.
So yeah, you can, you can go now. I think
it's in Bredford, yet it is in Breadforton where you
can have the Asparagus Festival. And what the festival is
is like the first auction of asparagus, right, and then
they'll auction that off for a local cause. Normally the
first you know, the first full bundle of asparagus verus

(01:17:16):
round it's called, and that will immediately get brought up
by someone. People buy hundreds of pounds for it. Wow,
and then they rush it off to their restaurant in London, right,
and they make it for their fancy people to pay
fancy money for this fancy vegetable. Famously, Famously, I perhaps
overstated that Gus the Asparagus Man was refused entry to

(01:17:37):
the Houses of Parliament in the United Kingdom maybe maybe
ten fifteen years ago now because it's costume primented a
security risk. Wow.

Speaker 5 (01:17:45):
Wait okay, as someone who's had asparagus in an asparagus town,
and also here is there a difference in taste?

Speaker 4 (01:17:54):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Fresh asparagus is a lot better
when you get it in American shops. It's very woody like.
It doesn't have that I would describe raw asparagus where
it's fresh. You know when you get peas and you've
grown peas, you're having the peas. Yeah, so it has that. Yeah,
love a fresh pea. So it's got that kind of

(01:18:15):
you can take that however you want. It's got that
kind of pea freshness and sweetness to it.

Speaker 5 (01:18:21):
That's really good.

Speaker 4 (01:18:22):
It is really good, Scharene. That's why we have a
whole thing about it.

Speaker 5 (01:18:25):
How good asparagu It's not gonna lie.

Speaker 4 (01:18:27):
I'm going to grow some.

Speaker 5 (01:18:28):
I don't seek it out.

Speaker 4 (01:18:30):
Yeah, we'll go on a world tour. We'll doe there'll
be a nice combination. Actually, you're going to see chin asparagus.
So what you're doing with the asparagus, right, you cut
it and you just get its hand cut right. You're
not going through like a combine harvester to do this.
You're going through the little knife, serrated knife sharp on
the back side. You just cutting the stalks and you
immediately you level them off right at the base, so
you sort of so that the point to tips are level,

(01:18:52):
and then you just cut across the base. So some
of them are going to have more of the woody
white bass than others. The parts the green part has
been above. The toy on in the white puts below
right right. So you're doing them. You get you're around
or you get your have many sparagus, you're getting right.
You get it very fresh. Often when at least when
we were buy it, we would just buy it like
from farm shops or by the side of the road.

(01:19:13):
We never grew it because it was just like a
lot You could get a lot more from just doing
other vegetables. But you'd buy it the day it was harvested,
and then you drive it home immediately put it into
boiling water just briefly, right, and then you pop it
out and you don't need to cook it for very
long if it's good, if you don't want to cook
it for very long rate, just just softening it a
little bit. And then if you have it with there's

(01:19:35):
original way to have it. It's with butter, which kind
of you know, does away with the cereal cholesterol benefit.
Nice to dip in a in a soft.

Speaker 5 (01:19:43):
Boiled and curious. I mean, the health stuff was just
like a fun ti bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's do
you know how you want?

Speaker 4 (01:19:50):
Yeah, have it. However, you want dip it in a
in a soft boiled egg where you were you boil
the egg, but the yolk is still run dip the
asparagusy in Yeah, never even part of that cambo. Yeah,
it's a good one. It's lots of uh what's a
good childhood memories or asparagus in the egg? Yeah, lots
of fun ways to eat it. Other things about the
vale of vives from asparagus. Yeah, he Gussy the asparagus man.

(01:20:12):
He visited the I.

Speaker 5 (01:20:14):
Want to repeat that. He's called Gus. Sorry, Gus the
asparagus man.

Speaker 4 (01:20:18):
Sorry, he visited the European Parliament where he read and
there is uh true. Will I see a video of this? Actually, Sreen,
I think it would be good for you.

Speaker 5 (01:20:26):
Oh gosh, So.

Speaker 4 (01:20:27):
Here's a video of Gusty asparagus man in the European
Parliament reading a poem. England is crazy one of them
more like pro oh god, yeah, now you want to
listen to it as well.

Speaker 5 (01:20:40):
The Great and Noble Asparagus.

Speaker 4 (01:20:42):
Sorry, I'm sorry he's doing it again. He's reading a
poem about asparagus, that's correct.

Speaker 2 (01:20:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:20:51):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (01:20:51):
And then he's making a joke about about cider another
great more of a Hereford product than another great local product.
But yeah, yeah, I come from the home home of
Gussie asparagus man. I've enjoyed many many asparaguy. It's nice
when we have really miserable like January, February even into
March in the UK is miserable. Like we get much

(01:21:13):
shorter days, right because a bit of being further north,
it rains a lot, Like we don't get winters like
American cold places where you get like dry or like
snowy kind of winters. We just get like right around
freezing and raining a lot of the time, which is
the worst weather that is possible to have. And it's
just fucking miserable. So like when you're having the asparagus,

(01:21:35):
it's like a nice sign days. Our summer days are
really long as well, so you're getting these nice long
summer days. You're like starting to get like it comes
after what they call the hungry gap, right that time
in like February March where you're not getting as many
of your fresh vegetables sort of the time when you're
not really harvesting very much, so you've only got like
your storage stuff, right, your apples and potatoes, and so

(01:21:57):
after that you get your asparagus. It's the start of
your spring vege. So it's a nice little, nice little
celebration of springtime.

Speaker 5 (01:22:04):
Yeah, I mean, I didn't know anything about asparagus other
than it made your pea smell until this episode.

Speaker 4 (01:22:10):
Son't even make your pea smell. Would say, is that
the asparagene.

Speaker 5 (01:22:15):
Well, okay, asparagus is your pea smell because what asparagus
is digested, asparagustic acid gets broken down into sulfur containing byproducts,
and sulfur smells like eggs and also apparently can smell
like pea because sulfur in general is not pleasant to
the smell. And then when you peet, these byproducts evaporate

(01:22:36):
almost immediately, and this is what you this is what
causes you to smell that very unpleasant scent.

Speaker 4 (01:22:42):
Yeah, you could tell if someone's find out the asparagus.

Speaker 5 (01:22:45):
I thought the answer is usually sulfur when it comes
to food and smells.

Speaker 4 (01:22:49):
Yeah it is. Yeah, bad eggs too.

Speaker 3 (01:22:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:22:52):
I want to end this episode with just a tale
of a town in the US where it had their
of king asparagus.

Speaker 4 (01:23:01):
I want to just wow, Okay, I want to talk
about this for a moment.

Speaker 5 (01:23:05):
It was once the biggest US producers of asparagus. Less
than a century ago, the town of Aiken, South Carolina,
was known as one of the asparagus capitals of the US.
From the mid eighteenth through the mid twentieth centuries, cotton
was the South's predominant crop, and Aichen was no exception
to this. Just before the Civil War, cotton comprised nearly

(01:23:28):
sixty percent of all American exports. The phrase King Cotton
which was made famous by then Senator and then future
Governor James Henry Hammond. He implied that the European industry
depended heavily on Southern cotton. He owned the Redcliffe Plantation
in Beach Island, Aikin County. Enslaved people obviously provided the

(01:23:50):
labor for cotton cultivation, and so him, along with scores
of other plantation owners. He hoped that buyers of Southern
cotton would fight against the blockade enacted by Lincoln's federal forces,
and Southerners, because of this, were certain that their cotton
exports were so crucial that Europeans would surely back the
South in the event of a Civil war. Spoiler alert

(01:24:13):
that did not happen, and then by eighteen sixty five,
the outcome of the Civil War had planters looking at
their commercial ventures in a new way. Farmers broke their
dependence on cotton, and they desperately tried to find and
locate another king crop. A variety of crops could thrive
in the warm, sandy soil of Achen. The first reference

(01:24:34):
to asparagus being grown as a commercial crop in South
Carolina can be found in a nineteen oh three pamphlet
called Asparagus Its Culture for Home and for Market. According
to the pamphlet, the crop was first grown commercially in Charleston,
where farmers produced a specific variety called palmetto. It was
cultivated especially to flourish in the southern climate, and soon

(01:24:57):
this specialized variety spread into a Bacon, Williston, and Bamberg counties.
By nineteen eighteen, the Clemson University Department of Agricultural Economics
reported that the state had about eleven hundred acres of
asparagus under cultivation. Fast forward to nineteen thirty seven, this
number increased to eighty seven hundred acres. So area residents

(01:25:20):
enjoyed their share of fresh asparagus, but most of it
was sent to New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, d c.
From the nineteen twenties through the mid nineteen fifties, asparagus
was gathered daily and shipped by train to its northern destinations.
Shippers often wrapped the delicate spears and Spanish moss gathered
from the live oak trees that abounded the city. The

(01:25:43):
crop flourished commercially for almost thirty years until production slowed
down in nineteen fifty three. World War II may have
lessened the workforce available to farm the crop, or perhaps
the marketing success from the California competitors was more effective
than South Carolina's. It is also possible let the varieties
grow an Achen and the surrounding areas were more susceptible

(01:26:03):
to diseases that weakened the crops, and so although several
farms near Achen still grow asparagus, according to aichinregional dot com,
the reign of King Asparagus is over.

Speaker 2 (01:26:17):
It's sad.

Speaker 4 (01:26:19):
Yeah not here, still king in my heart.

Speaker 5 (01:26:22):
I just thought that was a funny little tail, but yeah,
that's asparagus for you. Thank you, James for motivating this knowledge.

Speaker 4 (01:26:31):
That I now have it's okay. Take that, carry that
with you for the rest of your life. Use it wisely.

Speaker 5 (01:26:38):
Thank you, and yeah, that's this episode of it could
happen here Until next time, I don't.

Speaker 3 (01:26:45):
Know to sleep.

Speaker 8 (01:26:47):
Bye, hello, and welcome back to it could happen here.
I'm your occasional host, Molly Conger, and it's just me today.

(01:27:09):
But I've got a weird one for you now. I
don't know if you remember, but a few months ago
I did an episode about a ring of Hitler loving
zoom bombers running a national campaign to disrupt public meetings.
Those guys were mostly members of the Goyam Defense League,
an anti Semitic group of freaks who just love getting
a rise out of people. They were calling themselves the

(01:27:31):
City Council Death Squad, and they've disrupted hundreds of virtual
public meetings from coast to coast over the last year,
everything from zoning boards in New Jersey to city council
meetings in California, even dipping their toe into messing with
online meetings of alcoholics anonymous. They mostly seem motivated by
their insatiable need to force strangers to hear them say

(01:27:51):
the N word. But I do think they understand that
their behavior limits people's access to local government. Many of
the cities they targeted responded by ending virtual participation in
government meetings. That means fewer people participate. It's harder to
engage with local government, and people just generally feel less
safe and less motivated to pursue the kinds of redress
available to them through local democracy. And I'm glad we

(01:28:14):
did the episode. I heard from people in maybe a
dozen cities all over the country who found the episode
online when they were trying to figure out what the
hell happened at their own meeting and the guy's doing it.
Liked the episode so much that now they use my
name when they call into meetings to scream slurs, which
is a less positive outcome, But what can you do.
I assume if the mayor of Redlands, California googles me,

(01:28:35):
he'll figure out I wasn't the one doing Holocaust denial
at his meeting. But overall, this seems like the kind
of thing that will be prosecute able, especially considering we
know the real names of many of the group's ringleaders. Well,
someone has finally been indicted for orchestrating hateful zoom bombing
and virtual city council meetings. But it isn't them, It's

(01:28:56):
something much, much weirder. Last month, FEDS unsealed an indictment
against a man named Mohammad al Hashemi. He's a Syrian
national from Albania currently living in England, and according to
the federal prosecutor, he was the mastermind behind a zoom
bombing ring that targeted the Fresno City Council in the
summer of twenty twenty. He's been charged with one count

(01:29:18):
of engaging in repeated harassing communication, one count of engaging
in anonymous telecommunications harassment, three counts of a classic eighteen USC.
Eight seventy five C transmitting threatening communications, and one count
of conspiracy for doing all of the above. Right, So
there's a conspiracy, and then those other charges represent the

(01:29:38):
over acts of that conspiracy. Now, again, I'm not a lawyer.
I'll tell you that every time. I don't know all
the laws, and so this is the first time I'm
realizing that harassing someone by phone is a federal crime.
I mean, it makes sense, right, of course, that's illegal
at the federal level too. I just didn't think about
that the last time we were talking about zoom bombing.

(01:30:00):
I mean, the obvious charge is interstate threats. If you
make a threat using a phone, the internet, or the mail,
that's federal territory. But prosecutors are sometimes a little gun
shy about threats. They want a slam dunk case. They
want a true threat, right, something that is undeniably an
actual threat, before they'll bring a case like that. So
I thought they'd have to get a little creative if

(01:30:22):
they wanted to indict zoom bombers. But if you're just
talking about harassing phone calls, it's actually pretty straightforward to
bring a federal case against the guys doing this. So
two of the charges of the indictment are for different
subsections of forty seven USC. Two twenty three Obscene or
harassing phone calls. Subsection A one C is making a

(01:30:43):
telephone call or utilizing a telecommunications device, right, So that
means it doesn't have to be a literal telephone. It
can be a zoom call. It can be in any
kind of telecommunications device like text message, et cetera. Whether
or not conversation or communication ensues, which means you know,
repeated harassing hang up calls.

Speaker 7 (01:30:59):
Count two.

Speaker 8 (01:31:00):
You don't even have to say anything without disclosing his
identity and with the intent to abuse, threatn or harass
a specific person, So this subsection is specific to the
fact that they were using fake names. And then subsection
A one E is making repeated telephone calls or repeatedly
initiating communication with the telecommunications device during which conversation or

(01:31:21):
communication ensues solely to harass any specific person. Both of
those counts carry a maximum sentence of two years, and
they're usually just punished with a fine, not that serious.
The other counts are a little more serious. Interstate threatening
communications can get you up to five years per count,
and some of these calls had some pretty violent language.
I'm interested to see how they move forward with the threats,

(01:31:42):
though the actual intent or ability to carry out a
threat doesn't necessarily matter if the person the threat was
made to was in reasonable fear from it, but I'm
sure we'll see It argued that he was in Albania
he never planned to go to Fresno to hurt people.
The obvious counter to that, though, is that he did
literally say he was in Fresno, and there was no
obvious indication to the victims that that wasn't true, and

(01:32:03):
he's also charged with conspiracy. The indictment refers multiple times
to unnamed co conspirators, so this isn't just one guy
making racist, praying phone calls. This is an organized and
intentional conspiracy to engage in harassment and threats.

Speaker 4 (01:32:18):
That conspiracy is a little grim.

Speaker 8 (01:32:22):
The FBI in the UK's Metropolitan Police Force did find
an interview at least nine members of the group they're
saying Alhacemi was leading, and the reason they aren't named
is because they are children. The children interviewed by the
FBI had pretty consistent accounts. Once there was a federal
agent in their living room telling their mom about the
Albanian Nazi they'd been chatting with on roadblocks. Okay, not

(01:32:43):
exactly roadblocks, that's a little hyperbolic, but the raids were
coordinated on a platform called Gilded, which is kind of
like Discord and is owned by the same company as Roadblocks,
so it's mostly used by gamers to talk about gaming,
but also apparently for doing federal crimes. But the kids
all said the group's leaders were users named Encino. That's

(01:33:04):
i ns e E n O, not in Sino like Incino.
Man the poly Shore movie and Sapper. Many of the
kids correctly ascertained that Encino, the user FEDS have identified
as Al Hashemi, was older than they were and European,
but spoke English very well. I went back and pulled
the public access TV recordings of some of those meetings

(01:33:25):
and listened to the calls attributed to Alhachemi, and he
really doesn't have an accent that I could hear. You know,
you don't got a hand it to him or anything.
But he does say the N word like a red
blooded American racist, so I guess he had some practice.
The kid, interviewed by the Metropolitan Police Service at his parents'
house in London, said that Sapper was a college student
in the United Arab Emirates, although in the footnotes the

(01:33:47):
FBI agent indicates that actually Sapper is in Jordan, but
you know, close enough for a teenager. I can't find
any information about whether or not charges are being pursued
against that user, either in the US or in Jordan.
He isn't identified by name at all, but he does
appear to be the only other adult discussed in that document.
The English teenager said Sapper loves spamming, the calls they

(01:34:09):
raid with isis gore videos. The criminal complaint details seven
incidents of zoom raids in June and July of twenty
twenty five of which were meetings of the Presno City Council.
One was a Jewish religious service conducted by Zoom in Albuquerque,
New Mexico, and the other was some random couple's wedding
in upstate New York. But the incidents described in detail
in the complaint are clearly not the only ones that happened,

(01:34:32):
just the only ones being charged at this time. When
FBI agents interviewed a thirteen year old boy in Oregon,
he told them the group's leader also enjoyed zoom bombing
parent teacher conferences, specifically at schools that had had past
active shooter events. The boy said, Encino again, that's al Hachemi,
according to the complaint, loves to offend people and talks

(01:34:53):
about racist things more than anyone else. But you know
who doesn't love to offend people. The sponsors of this show.

Speaker 4 (01:35:08):
And we are back.

Speaker 8 (01:35:09):
I hope you enjoyed those products and services. Hopefully none
of them were. Four online chat platforms where European neo
Nazis are recruiting your kids, all right, So all these
criminal charges here are related to conduct that occurred in
the span of less than five weeks four full years ago.
But for as long as it took to actually indict Alhacemi,

(01:35:30):
it looks like the FEDS acted pretty quickly. After the
first few threats were made. They were sitting at the
dining room table talking to a kid identified as RB
by August twenty seventh, barely two months after the call started.
RB is described as a juvenile with a history of
making threats who lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Obviously, it's
impossible to identify this minor, and probably not a good

(01:35:53):
idea to do even if I could, But I am
dying to know what exactly that history of threats looks like.
I found a couple of news stories in the year
or two before this about teens in the Spartanburg area
who'd been arrested for making threats. Now, Obviously, again, even
in those news stories, if a miner is arrested and
are identified, so there's no way to sort of connect
these two unnamed teens. But I did find a story

(01:36:15):
about a ninth grader who posted a snapchat on the
day of the Parkland school shooting in twenty eighteen, I
was a photo of the teenager holding a realistic fake
gun with the caption round two of Florida tomorrow. Again,
it's impossible to say if there's any connection, but the
general age, location, and interest in school shootings definitely caught

(01:36:35):
my eye. Another member of the group, identified as a
miner named CG in North Caldwell, New Jersey, sometimes used
the name Adam Lanza during the zoom raids, an homage
to the Sandy Hook school shooter, and when the FBI
was chatting with RB on August twenty seventh, he told
him about another user in the discord who posted often
about his desire to carry out a school shooting and

(01:36:57):
wanting to kill a Few days after that, the FBI
agents were sitting down with that thirteen year old boy
and his parents in Oregon. That boy, identified as PM,
told the agents that Encino wasn't just interested in zoom bombing,
but the group also dosed people, naming a bizarre list
of targets ranging from Jewish leaders to yoga teachers and
cooking classes. PM also told the agents that Encino had

(01:37:21):
docksed a former member of the group, a girl identified
in a footnote as LT, after a disagreement over whether
or not they should be using so many racial slurs
in the prank phone calls. Now I know, I said
it wasn't possible or even advisable to try to identify
these miners, but it turns out it is possible, and
she's not a miner anymore.

Speaker 7 (01:37:43):
I don't know.

Speaker 8 (01:37:43):
Maybe the rule is if you're old enough to drive drunk,
you're old enough to get talked about on a podcast.
She's got a court date coming up for a DUI
arrest in April. The girl identified as LT was docked
by the group's leader in July twenty twenty, when she
was just sixteen, and we only have that thirteen year
old as firing school shooter's word for it as to
why she left the group. Maybe it is possible that

(01:38:03):
she disagreed with the racial slur heavy call scripts, but
I don't think that's because she's not a huge fan
of racism. She shows up that same year in leaked
discord chats from the servers Groper Haven and Nick Fuentes Unofficial,
both servers for fans of Nick Quente's She identifies herself
as a paleo conservative, Christian monarchist and claims to know

(01:38:26):
Nick Quentez. Then another user asked her if she likes Nick.

Speaker 2 (01:38:30):
She says, yeah, he's cool, but she takes issue with
the fact.

Speaker 8 (01:38:34):
That he wants to marry a white woman because he is,
in her eyes, not white, and says whites are better
than any other race and we need to stay inside
of our own race. A few sort of vestigial stitches
of videos with her now banned TikTok account show her
in a Trump shirt and Maga hat giving the camera
this weird Kubrick stare as. The text girls that think

(01:38:58):
communists should be jailed appears over her head. You know,
kids will be kids, right, Just classic kids stuff, wanting
to imprison your political enemies and being really opposed to
race mixing.

Speaker 4 (01:39:11):
Well.

Speaker 8 (01:39:11):
Last summer, she gave a speech about canceled culture to
the Burkes County Patriots, an anti government extremist group that
sent charter buses to the insurrection, and public records show
she received a stipend as a legislative intern at the
Pennsylvania House of Representatives. The teenage Groper to legislative Aid
pipeline is something that should concern us all a little
bit more. But doxing LT seems to have frightened some

(01:39:34):
of the other kids. PM that's thirteen year old in
Oregon told agents he was worried the group would dox
him if he tried to leave BO. A minor in
North Carolina told agents he believed in Sino had access
to his computer by a spyware. AM, a seventeen year
old in Maryland, provided agents with screenshots showing in Sino
had posted his address and discussed having him swatted. And

(01:39:56):
this is such a messy, ugly thing, right, So first
of all, the are kids. They're kids, right, One of
them is as young as thirteen, and that has to
be front of mind in all of this. But even
if they lack the frontal lobe capacity to really understand
the consequences of saying you're going to kill someone, this
isn't just normal kid acting out behavior, right. PM told

(01:40:20):
other users he wanted to shoot up his school. AM
posted often about wanting to build bombs and blow things
up and expressed a lot of interest in isis. They
were all calling into these meetings and saying the most shocking,
upsetting things they could think of, and it's not one
hundred percent clear why right, Like they didn't all necessarily
have the same motivations or understandings. A teenager identified as

(01:40:46):
kh told agents the goal is to create such a
disturbance that the hosts have no choice but determinate the meeting.
Hurting people's feelings along the way is completely in bounds,
and the slurs were just a means to that end.
He said they would quote just have fun in there.
Am told agents he was just posting quote random things,

(01:41:08):
but he also admitted he hates Jews, and so maybe
it's a meaningless exercise to try to nail down exactly
how ideologically committed these teens were to this project of
racial and religious harassment. But Ala Sheemi is also not
the first Nazi to see the value in recruiting teens online.
They may just be kids talking shit right now, but

(01:41:29):
if you hear a kid talking this type of shit,
don't brush it off right This starts somewhere, This edgy, shocking,
un serious sort of four chan style racism crystallizes into
serious ideological commitment for some of them. And I hope
these kids' parents were able to provide some meaningful intervention
after they found out what their kids were up to online.

(01:41:50):
And back to that timeline, right, So the indictment only
lists the June twenty twenty calls as the overt acts
of the conspiracy, but the date range for the charge
conduct is actually May twenty twenty to February twenty twenty two,
and maybe that means they plan to introduce additional evidence
of other calls to support the conspiracy claim. It's hard
to say. They're being pretty tight lipped about it. Reporting

(01:42:12):
by Jason Koebler for four or four Media says the
Department of Justice declined to comment on the possibility of
anyone else being charged, and the criminal complaint goes into
some detail by interviewing multiple cooperative miners, But it is
possible the records they got back from these various platforms
led them to other co conspirators who are old enough
to catch a federal charge. There are a lot of

(01:42:32):
details missing here that we'll just have to wait for.
The docket shows that Alihemi has retained an attorney. I
assume they wouldn't have unsealed the indictment if they didn't
have him in custody, but there's no information available at
when or where he was arrested, and how that extradition
is coming along. And it's interesting to me how incredibly
similar the mo is in this case to the ring
led by the Gham Defense League.

Speaker 3 (01:42:53):
Guys.

Speaker 8 (01:42:54):
I mean, it's not exactly a complicated plan. It's not
hard to believe that racists who never met each other
would end deependently arrive at the same gross way of
bothering people. But take for example, one of the incidents
in the indictment. The man that they alleged was Alhahemi
called into the Fresno City Council meeting on June eleventh,
twenty twenty. During public comment. He pretended to be a
local resident named Brian, and he started off pretty normal, saying,

(01:43:17):
you know, I agree with the previous speaker. He's sort
of indicating that he's interested in and engaged in the
topic of the meeting. He expresses an opinion about the
topic at hand, which happened to be police funding, and
then suddenly he pivots to a violent call for murder
of black residence and repeatedly uses the N word. And
so after that call ends, the council's on high alert

(01:43:37):
for disruptive callers, so subsequent members of the group don't
bother with a script or a backstory. They just start
shouting slurs the second they connect until they're booted from
the call.

Speaker 6 (01:43:47):
Right.

Speaker 8 (01:43:47):
So in this case, the caller after fake Brian was
that miner from South Carolina, And when his call connects,
you can hear him laughing, and he just says the
N word and they hang up on him. I don't know,
maybe I'm two hung up on the structural similarities here.
I guess that's just classic crank call procedure, right. You
start off with the reasonable ruse, You get the person
you've called to believe this is a real normal phone call,

(01:44:07):
and then you shock and upset them by making a
hard right turn into the I guess you can't really
call it a punchline if it's not funny, but you
know what I mean. But if you took the names
out of this indictment, you could mistake these descriptions of
calls for city Council death squad scripts. But they didn't
start doing their zoom bombing until the summer of twenty
twenty three, and according to this indictment, the FBI agents
were having uncomfortable conversations with teenage boys all the way

(01:44:29):
back in twenty twenty. So I think if there was
any overlap between these two zoom bomb rings, we'd know
by now. I think this is just unrelated racists reaching
the same horrible conclusion. But if those guys are listening,
I hope they hear the significance of that timeline. Within
weeks of that first zoom bomb. In this indictment, they
had search warrants for the homes of two of the

(01:44:50):
miners on those calls. I think a lot of people
assume that if they don't get caught, they aren't going
to get caught. You see that a lot on tax
evasion cases. Right after you do it a few years
in a row, you figure they're never going to get you,
so you keep doing it. You get a little bolder,
But they're just taking their time and building their case.
Just because you haven't been caught yet, does it mean

(01:45:11):
they don't know you're doing it?

Speaker 4 (01:45:13):
So who knows.

Speaker 8 (01:45:14):
Maybe we'll see a similar indictment against the GDL guys
a few years after they started doing it. There's not
really a button to put on this one. We'll have
to wait for more filings than Al Hashemi's case to
learn anything more there, But if you know any teenagers,
check in with them, make sure they're actually playing roeblocks
and not being coaxed into doing federal crime by a

(01:45:34):
Nazi in Albania. You know what better yet, go outside,
unplug your router, be free.

Speaker 2 (01:45:57):
First, no matter what happens, to breathe. It's always good
advice to breathe, But taking good advice is easier said
than done. Sometimes the world is so overwhelming that any
added weight, even the weight of oxygen in your lungs,
feels like it might be enough to drag you down.
This is one of those times. The last week has

(01:46:18):
brought about ten years worth of news, and we are
all processing the seemingly inevitable coronation of a dictator and
the sudden hope and possibility inspired by Joe Biden's stepping
down from the nomination Welcome to It could happen here.
I'm Robert Evans, and this is a podcast about things
falling apart and sometimes about how to put them back together.

(01:46:39):
The last time I sat down to talk with all
of you like this was in the immediate aftermath of
the Trump assassination attempt just before the Republican National Convention.
I told you not to panic. That's still good advice.
I also told you that no matter how bad or
good things may look, literally anything can happen in US politics,

(01:47:00):
and by god, it has. I felt it was necessary
to deliver that message because I saw an awful lot
of people declaring We're doomed. Fascism is inevitable, and quite frankly,
I think shit like that only helps the fascists. Well,
it turned out I was right. A lot has happened
over the last two weeks, and the situation now is
very different than it was the day the former president

(01:47:22):
took that grazing blow from a sniper's bullet. As is
usually the case and instances like this, I've had a
lot of people reach out to me since that episode,
saying versions of how did you know? And as good
as it might be for my career to lean into
that side of my reputation, the truth is that I
am white knuckling it through every twist and turn like
everyone else. I spent the RNC wondering if I'd been

(01:47:43):
foolish telling people not to panic, and yes, I feel
a hell of a lot better right now. Of course,
I don't know what comes next. I just know that
we're done with the portion of this mess where we
spiral in a hopeless mire That was last week. This week,
the outlook is a lot better. And not because Kamala
Harris is our savior or because Nancy Pelosi is a

(01:48:04):
three D chess master, but because men age and die.
This is a fact I tried to remind myself of
as I'd grown through that disastrous debate with the rest
of the country. On one hand, I felt like we
were all about to watch one ailing, power hungry man
hand the keys to the kingdom over to a cadre
of bloodthirsty fascists. But on the other hand, there's always

(01:48:26):
something inherently optimistic in this simple reality. The people who
would be our rulers will all die someday, and so
long as men die, liberty will never perish. So long
as men die, we have hope. I stole that line
from Charlie Chaplin. He put it in the mouth of
his character from The Great Dictator, a movie he produced

(01:48:46):
at great personal cost in nineteen forty riot. As Hitler
and the Nazis reached the apex of their power. A
rational analyst staring out at the playing field after the
fall of France, could be forgiven for having seen the
outcome as certain Great Britain stood alone, Hitler's armies victorious
on every theater, and the future of democracy and human
liberty gasping for breath. One such rational analyst was Joseph Kennedy,

(01:49:11):
US ambassador to Great Britain and patriarch of the Kennedy family.
Joseph was a man of wealth and power, whose sober
judgment and cunning had seen him short the entire US
stock market, and the kind of fortune that let him
buy his way into the ranks of global royalty. He
was a man who had predicted the future once one big,
and he let that convince him that he had the

(01:49:31):
second sight. And so in November nineteen forty, less than
a month after the release of the Great Dictator, Kennedy
found himself in an interview with the Boston Globe, looking
out at the ruin of Europe and the bombs falling
on London. He told a reporter, democracy is finished in England.
It may be here here, of course, being the United States. Now.

(01:49:52):
The resulting blowback to all of this saw Kennedy force
to resign his ambassadorship. The very next year, Hitler invaded
the the Soviet Union, and for several brutal months it
looked like Joe had been right. Not only might democracy
be finished, but every system besides fascism might be hurtling
towards annihilation and bondage under the Swastika, depending on how

(01:50:14):
you count it. The Third Reich and fascism as a whole,
reached its greatest extent of territorial power in either mid
August or September nineteen forty one. By November of nineteen
forty one, a year after Joe Kennedy's remarks to the Globe,
Operation Barbarossa had been wrenched to a bloody halt, and
the long battle to push the fascists back and drown

(01:50:34):
them in the waters of their birth had begun. And
so in the end it was Charlie Chaplin, not Joe Kennedy,
who had the proper measure of things. Liberty survived because
men died, many millions of them, from Kiev to Canterbury.
We live in very different times now. The armies of
fascism are not primarily conquering land under arms. The primary

(01:50:56):
terrain of our present conflict exists within the hearts and
souls of men and women. And while populism is still
a favorite mechanism of action among the fascists, they have
in this country at least given up on victory by
sheer weight of numbers. It's true what they say, war
never changes. Weapons do, But the core of all human
conflict revolves around the capture and denial of territory. If

(01:51:20):
you can't occupy ground yourself, you must at least deny
it to the enemy. In infantry combat, this is the
primary use of a machine gun, not to kill people,
but to blanket an area in bullets and stop the
enemy from moving through it. In our modern war of
thoughts and feelings, the machine gun has yielded to the
fire hose of propaganda and disinformation. These have always been

(01:51:42):
parts of the fascist arsenal, but the Internet has allowed
an increase in the scale and speed of their deployment
that is very much comparable to the replacement of bolt
action rifles with automatic ones. The forces of basic human
decency have a natural advantage in terms of human terrain
that should be impossible for the fascists to counter, no
matter what the bastards say, most people want to be

(01:52:03):
left alone with the people they love to live their lives.
The forces of hate, the people who want to throw
trans kids in their parents in gas chambers and drown
migrants in the Rio Grande tap out at a little
over a third of the population max. If you want
to return to World War II metaphors, and why wouldn't you?
The monsters are stuck in tiny, landlocked Germany without any

(01:52:25):
gas or steel. The only way for them to access
the resources in territory they need to maneuver themselves into
a victory is by cutting us off from each other
and keeping us too confused and divided to surround the
bastards and smother them all for good. They do this
by convincing you that you are isolated, alone and surrounded
by them. Our hopelessness is their force multiplier. When leftists

(01:52:49):
in the US look out at Ukrainians struggling for survival
and write them off as Nazis, as diluted tools of imperialism,
When liberals in blue cities to cry college students protesting
on behalf of dying Palestinian children as agents of Hamas,
the lines of solidarity between a snap rather than wrapping
like a garret around the throats of our opponents. This
is why you've seen so much allegiance and sympathy between

(01:53:12):
the cruelest and most deluded segments of the Western left.
The people who laughed at Syrian civilians sheltering from Bushah
al Assad's bombs and called them the CIA and the
agents of Putin's Russia and Peter Teal's neo monarchist right.
The Teals, Bannons, Putin's Airdoins, Trumps and Modis of the
world know how lonely they are. The only way they
can win is to convince you that you're alone. Then

(01:53:34):
they have you at a disadvantage. Then they can kill
us one by one. You know, there's no smooth way
to transition to an ad and a piece like this,
But here it is. We're back now. I'm not a

(01:53:58):
young man, but I do sometimes the think of humanity
as a single, vast, gestalt organism groping for survival and
comfort in a world that mostly exists beyond what we
can see. Majority of people are happy existing as part
of that vast whole. We take comfort and safety in
our communion with the rest of the species. But there
are a few diseased minds out there that don't believe

(01:54:20):
in the rest of us. These sollipsists see themselves as
the only minds, and the perpetuation of their own power
and will as the only real good. That's why men
like Peter Teel seek physical immortality, and it's why men
like Vladimir Putin or Hitler seek the kind of immortality
that comes from welding the edifice of a nation state
to themselves. Hitler is Germany, and Germany will last forever.

(01:54:44):
Elon Musk sees his children as an extension of himself,
and his fantasies of space colonization are really just a
fantasy that he will remain central to humanity's future down
through eternity. Musk has repeatedly identified himself as a pro natalist,
and he believes his responsibilities to have as many children
as possible to secure a pro human future. The term

(01:55:06):
pro human might confuse you, given the lack of concern
he has for the children being bombed in Gaza or
who will surely die in the mass deportation camps through
a publican party is currently salivating to open. But the
only real human Elon sees is himself, which is why
he equates the survival of the species with his own
ability to breed. As I type, this video has begun

(01:55:28):
circulating around the Internet from an interview Musk conducted with
Jordan Peterson for The Daily Wire. In it, Musk explains
why he has now fully embraced politics, endorsing Donald Trump
and declaring himself at war with wokeism, which he describes
as an existential threat to the species. He claims that
what cinched this for him was his daughter deciding to transition.

Speaker 6 (01:55:50):
It happened to one of my older boys where I
was essentially tricked into signing documents for one of my
older boys.

Speaker 2 (01:56:02):
There was a lot of confusion, and.

Speaker 6 (01:56:06):
You know, I was told, oh, you know, might commit
suicide if it's incredibly evil, And I agree with you
that people that have been promoting this should go to president.
So I was, I was straight into doing this. You know,
it wasn't explained to me that puberty blocks are actually
just sterilization drugs.

Speaker 2 (01:56:25):
So I lost my son essentially.

Speaker 6 (01:56:28):
So you know they they quote dead naming for a reason. Yeah, right,
So the reason it's quote dead naming is because so
my son is dead, killed by the Wok mind virus.

Speaker 2 (01:56:41):
Musk's child is not in fact dead, but they have
expressed an identity utterly separate from Elon, an identity he
cannot understand. Because Musk can only see his children as
an extension of himself and his ego. This is in
fact worse than death. It is a threat to Musk's
own life. This, incidentally, is why Musk and his fellow

(01:57:03):
travelers see transgender kids as such a threat. Accepting a
trans child, even if you don't fully understand how and
why they feel the way they do, is one of
the most radical acts of love imaginable. To do this
means that you've accepted, on a fundamental level that your
children are autonomous beings, not an extension of you, but
something new, wonderful, and unique. The essence of parental love

(01:57:27):
is to give your children to the world. This means
accepting that you are finite that the world goes on
without you. If you see all humanity as an extension
of your own ego, nothing could be more frightening. The
people who feel this way, people like Elon, are mutations,
a glitch in the human system that starts as a
glitch within the heart of an individual. It comes as

(01:57:50):
a byproduct of success in the very visible, spectacular ways
that feed narcissism. When I think about stuff like this,
I refer often back to a great art by the
anthropologist Richard Lee, eating Christmas in the Kalahari. Lee spent
years living among the Ikung Bushmen, a Bantu speaking hunter
gatherer group who were seen by anthropologists as some of

(01:58:11):
the people still living in a manner most similar to
our ancient ancestors. One Christmas, as a show of gratitude
to his hosts, Lee purchased a massive ox for the
holiday feast. He was excited to show this great gift
off to his new friends, and he was proud of
himself for having gotten it, and he was utterly shocked
when they responded to his pride with mockery of him

(01:58:33):
and his ox, insulting it as scrawny, tiny, hardly fit
to eat now. This shockedly because the ox he had
purchased was of course quite large, and it was eventually
explained to him that his friends were reacting with mockery
not to his gift, but to the evident pride he
had shown in it, bringing in a great beast worth
of meat. Either as a hunter, or from buying it

(01:58:54):
as Burton did, is the kind of thing that can
go to a young man's head. If you are the
one with the poet book or the one who fires
the arrow, you can forget that the meat before you,
the meat that you've brought into the community, is not
the product purely of your own genius, but is a
product of all of the time and resources invested in
you by the community. The shaming of the meat, as

(01:59:17):
this tactic was called, is a time honored way of
correcting the glitch in young men of the Ukun before
it can turn terminal. As one elder in the tribe
eventually explained to Lee, when a young man kills much meat,
he comes to think of himself as a chief or
a big man, and he thinks of the rest of
us as his servants or inferiors. We can't accept this.
We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will

(01:59:39):
make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his
meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and
make him gentle. And speaking of cooling your heart, why
don't you cool your heart with some ads? And then
we'll come back to conclude this in a little bit,

(02:00:06):
We're back. It has been theorized that the shaming of
the meat is a social construct that may help to
explain one of the evolutionary values of satire, perhaps even
why humanity keeps producing comedians. They act as a part
of our species immune system. When this glitch in the
hearts of young men isn't punctured, when it's allowed to

(02:00:27):
take off and dominate them, then it changes them on
a fundamental level, and the being that it leaves in
its wake seems to understand instinctively that laughter is a
danger to it. This ultimately explains why Musk purchase Twitter
and why Barack Obama's mockery of Donald Trump during that
White House Correspondence Center set us all down the dark

(02:00:48):
path that we currently are walking. So clearly, humor alone
doesn't always save us from these kinds of people either.
What Will I Have several times and my various shows
identified myself as an anarchist, and I tend to do
that even though I don't feel fully comfortable with the title,
because brevity matters. I'm speaking to a mass audience and

(02:01:08):
using that word gets as close enough for the sake
of a podcast. But I'm not an anarchist in the
sense that I have some sort of clear vision for
how to build a utopia. Obviously, I do think anarchism
has some answers for how human beings might build a
better world. That's why I went through a Java, It's
why we cover a lot of the things that we
cover on these series. But I am primarily an anarchist

(02:01:31):
because I understand that hierarchy kills. Because I understand that
hierarchy separates us from each other and acts as a
petri dish within which this glitch can propagate. I'm an
anarchist because I love the people around me, because I
understand that I am human, and because I see that
my role in the human immune system is to remind

(02:01:51):
other people of that fact and to point a finger
at the people who have forgotten that they're human. I
promised in the title of this little piece that I
would tell you how we can win, and I can
do that in a few words. We have to remember
that we are humans. Amala Harris is an authoritarian. The
fact that she wants to be president at all should

(02:02:12):
make you leery of her. But she's not a Trump
or a Musk. She has not separated herself entirely from humanity,
if you'll forgive the reference. She understands that she exists
in the context of all that came before her. Joe
Biden has been hungry for power all his life. The
glitch is in him. It has consumed most of him,
but as we all learned recently, not all of him.

(02:02:34):
He too understands that he is a part of humanity,
indivisible from it. Now you can and should still view
the man with disgust, even hatred. He ought to be
in the Hague, but he also stepped down and gave
up the thing that a week ago I'd have said
probably mattered most to him in the world. This was
not a purely selfless gesture. I'm sure he acted in

(02:02:55):
a large part to try and salvage his own legacy.
But it is also not a thing thing Donald Trump
could ever do. You certainly wouldn't see a man like
Vladimir Putin make a similar choice, and we've all seen
the kind of slaughter bb net Yahoo is willing to
back to hold on to power. None of this redeems
Biden or makes him a good person or any less
complicit in genocide than he was a week ago. I

(02:03:18):
think it does put us in a better position when
it comes to fighting for a ceasefire in Gaza. Everyone
in US politics knows that Biden's political end started with
the surge of uncommitted voters in Michigan. The loss of
a second term is not a sufficient punishment for Biden's actions,
but it is a punishment that has the ability to
reshape the kind of risks US presidents will and won't

(02:03:41):
take for Israel from now on. It has also helped
me make sense of something that happened in twenty twenty.
You all remember the moment during the one presidential debate
that year, President Trump attacked Biden over the numerous scandals
of his son, Hunter, a troubled drug addict who tried
and largely failed to use his father's named secure wealth
and standing for himself. Hunter's troubles have been tremendously embarrassing

(02:04:06):
to his father, but up in front of the country
and world, Biden refused to throw his son under the bus.
He embraced him and expressed the kind of unconditional love
that is utterly alien to men like Trump and Musk. Biden,
for all the evil that he has done in the
raw selfishness that allowed him to reach the presidency in
the first place. Is a man who loves his son.

(02:04:27):
Most importantly, he loves Hunter as Hunter and not purely
as an extension of Joe Biden. There's an excellent series
of articles out in The Atlantic right now by Tim Alberta,
who might be the finest political journalist writing today. Tim
had the good instincts to look behind the scenes at
the team Trump picked to orchestrate his twenty twenty four campaign,

(02:04:47):
and he's delivered deep reporting about why they've made some
of the baffling decisions that they've made. Chief among bafflements
was the selection of j. D. Vance as Vice President.
Vance barely won his seat in Congress with the help
of tens of millions of teal dollars. He is a
liar without principle who has repeatedly expressed his desire to
tear up the Constitution and usher in a new red

(02:05:08):
caesar to bring this nation to heal under men like him.
I watched Vance's speech at the RNC live at a
Heritage Foundation party, surrounded by the rightest of the right,
not one of them offered a single word of praise.

Speaker 1 (02:05:23):
Vance.

Speaker 2 (02:05:23):
Was that bad JD is the sort of pick Trump's
handlers were sure that they could afford to make. Vance
would bring the Silicon Valley billionaire set to the table,
open up their purse strings, convince them they were welcome
in the new ruling class. Sure he wouldn't bring any votes,
But a week ago, running against Sleepy Joe, the sick
man of US politics, Trump's team felt they had votes

(02:05:46):
to spare. Well. Now the worm has turned. The Poles
still point to an election that is deeply in doubt.
But Poles don't say everything. The panic of their responses
to Biden's stepping down, the chaotic spree of hate, to
a single truth. They don't know what to do.

Speaker 1 (02:06:02):
Now.

Speaker 2 (02:06:03):
The monsters are off balance, stumbling, unable to find the ground.
We can see some evidence of this and the fact
that Musk just came out and canceled has promised forty
five million dollar monthly donations to the Trump campaign. This
is the first chain of solidarity between our enemies to crumble,
and it won't be the last. Every time that happens,
we get more room to move and maneuver. The fascists

(02:06:26):
may well regain their footing and time to crush us
But something else has happened in the last few days
as well. People, we humans, as a vast, blurry mob,
have started to remember how many of us there are,
and how much potential the weight of our numbers gives us.
We have started to reconnect with each other, and that
has also opened up possibilities that did not exist before.

(02:06:47):
Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party aren't going to bring
an end to global capitalism or drive a stake into
the heart of the oil and gas industry. There remains
so much else to do, so many other fights ahead
of us. But if we can crush the Republicplicans here,
it will be the fourth election cycle in a row
where the right made a war on trans people, on
the concept of diversity, on any kind of open, secular

(02:07:08):
society the core of their electoral efforts, and it will
be the fourth time that they have done that and lost.
If we break their lines and send them fleeing into
the hills, we have an opportunity to shatter their power
and use the momentum of that victory to start building
something better. There's no cleaner, easy route to a better future,
but our chances are a hell of a lot better.

(02:07:29):
The more of us that stay alive, and the more
scattered and frightened that we can make our enemies. Our
strength has always come from solidarity, from the understanding that
we need each other and that we are part of
each other. The Putins and Trumps and Musks and Teals
of the world are of course a part of humanity
as well, but they are incapable of seeing or accepting that.

(02:07:50):
And so long as that is the case, we outnumber them.
So long as that is the case, we can win.

Speaker 7 (02:08:09):
It could happen here. It's it could happen here at
the podcasts that is about. I don't know how everyone
hates trans people and how this has become a sort
of cross partisan thing. I'm your host, Bio Wong. We
are we have been doing. Oh god, I don't even
know what sort of number of RNC episodes are going

(02:08:30):
to have come out before this thing before you hear
this episode. But we are once again turning away from
their republic, from the sort of chaos and despair of
the Republican Party to turn towards the chaos and despair
of the Democratic Party. Yeah, we're gonna specifically be talking
about a series of what I think we're kind of

(02:08:50):
high profile fights in trans circles over sort of the
administration very publicly starting to write off trans kids. I
don't think it got that much news attention because, as
you may have noticed, it is, Yeah, a lot of
this is by very specifically Biden administration stuff. We are
recording the Sunday Warning the morning of the twenty first.
There is a real chance that by the end of
the day Biden is no longer the nominee. So we'll

(02:09:12):
get into that a little bit, but as of right now,
he's still the guy, and he is fucking us. So, yeah,
with you to talk about this is Karin Green, who
we have had on the show before. Is a trans
policy expert of many organizations and much experience, and yeah,
welcome back on this. Welcome back to the show.

Speaker 1 (02:09:30):
Hey, thanks to having a mea.

Speaker 9 (02:09:33):
Yeah, it's kind of fun to come back on to
talk more about this, because the timing of when you
had me on last time was pretty much ext just
before a montha four he went public with this new
stuff we're going to talk about.

Speaker 7 (02:09:45):
Yeah, so the last time we were talking about this,
it was largely about stuff that was kind of like
plausibly deniable for the administration, It was a lot of
sort of stuff buried in bureaucratic medutia. Whether or not
any of that stuff even exists anymore given recent Supreme
Court rule that have effectively annihilated the administrative state. Who knows.
But now having had the Supreme Court get their ability

(02:10:08):
to do this sort of non plausibly, they have full
lot gone on the record against trans kits. So I
guess I want to start there. Can can you sort
of explain what happened with this New York Times story
that kind of kicked this whole saga off.

Speaker 9 (02:10:21):
Yeah, So kind of the context is I'm a trans
policy analyst. It's what I do that unfortunately are not
that many of us in the country, and all those
of us, many of us are still employed in the
movement organization, so they can't talk about this stuff humbly.
But so he's been putting out the regulations that the
Biden administration has been putting out are not good regulations
for trans people, right, But it's hard to help people

(02:10:44):
understand that they're transphobic because it's a five hundred page
regulation and so you know, it's kind of wonky and
a little weird, and if there is comms like the
Biden administration and the orgs have been putting out calling
him pro trans and all this stuff. There's a big
barrier to overcome there with a wonky stuff like that.
But what happened a couple of days after the debate,

(02:11:06):
which I'm sure everyone saw, or if you didn't didn't
watch it live, you realized in a horror that you
now had to watch it to understand what this country
is going through. They there was some initial reporting around
how the WPATH Standards of Care Version eight came out.
So WPATH is the World Professional Association for Transfer or Health.

(02:11:27):
It is either last year or the year before they
updated the Standards of Care seven to Standards of Care eight.
This is a little background, sorry, And at the time
there was discussion among WPATH members, doctors and kind of
policy people to some degree about whether mentioning kind of
rough ages for what time, what age people tend to

(02:11:50):
start certain treatments like period blockers, hormones, that kind of thing,
what kind of normal age ranges those things happening. We
know from years years of advocacy and work and activism
is that if somebody writes something like those things down,
even if they present it as a kind of loose
guideline or this is where things typically fall. Policymakers will

(02:12:13):
write that stuff into law and rig and take what
is supposed to give doctors and patients, you know, room
to figure out what works best for them, and make
it a very strict regime. And so transactivists did not
want ages in the wpath Sock eight for that reason.
And in the one and only instance of pro trans

(02:12:34):
advocacy that I'm aware of her ever engaging in Rachel
Levine in AHHS kind of advocated with wpath not to
include those age ranges in it.

Speaker 3 (02:12:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:12:46):
Levine, by the way, is like the o WT health secretary.

Speaker 3 (02:12:51):
I think.

Speaker 7 (02:12:51):
Yeah, she's like the only trans like she's the.

Speaker 9 (02:12:55):
Highest ranked trans like you know, White House official ever
of maggitude.

Speaker 7 (02:13:00):
She's like she's like the only transperson, like openly transperson
possibly in history to ever like get to a position
where she has some authority and she doesn't use it
ever except this one time.

Speaker 9 (02:13:13):
It's a bit disappointment too. Was I was her biggest
fan in the world because she passed. She wrote Pennsylvania's
Narkann Standing Order, and I based my law in Louisiana
legalizing Narkhan and our subsequent standing order on hers. So
I thought it was really cool that Transforms had done
this in both places, and I really really was a
big and then she just crickets nothing. It is all

(02:13:33):
this terrible stuff happens. So that's the context in which
the New York Times was reporting. They somebody had gotten,
like some bad guys had gotten some of the emails
between Levin and w Path and were like trying to
make it into a scandal, right, And they and the
bad guys misrepresented kind of what the issue and discussion

(02:13:56):
was about, right, So we discussed what it was, but
the way that they would present it as, oh, you know,
w Path was trying to limit treatments to kids being
you know, old enough of a certain age, which is
not what they were doing. And they were trying to
present Levine as trying to get rid of those so
that five year olds could have surgery or whatever. It's so,

(02:14:17):
you know, just very very insincere. But so the media
was kind of reporting just on that because they love
muck breaking.

Speaker 7 (02:14:24):
Yeah, And partially the other thing we should mention it
is it was really it was extremely hard to figure
out what was going on for the issue reporting because
the New York Times, instead of employing trans journalists, they
employed transphobic journalists. And the thing about transpherbic journalists, they
don't fucking understand policy at all. Day They're like, they're
absolute fucking clouds. These people have no idea what the
fuck they're talking about, and so you know, when they're

(02:14:45):
trying to write a story that's about like leaked technical
policy documents, they have no fucking idea what they're doing,
and the reporting is gibberish. It's like I was trying
to understand it. And this is a real issue because
the only the source we had was this document of
this New York Times writer who like couldn't like the

(02:15:08):
New York Times writer who like couldn't find the back
of their hand with the map right trying to like
write out these skinned emails.

Speaker 9 (02:15:15):
I'm convinced sis people don't even understand that they don't
know what they're talking about, because I think they just
inherently feel like, oh, I have a gender, therefore I
know everything about gender.

Speaker 7 (02:15:26):
It's like you know, and like I I I, and
it's this is like mostly kind of like find ish.
But the problem is when you have you know, when
you have CIS journalists who don't know anything about trans
like people at all, who in a lot of places
don't think trans people exist trying to write these policy things,

(02:15:47):
it's they they have nothing.

Speaker 9 (02:15:49):
And yeah, so it wasn't presented super clearly, and so
other people had questions, some justified, some based on misunder
that misunderstanding, some not. But anyway, there was additional kind
of back and forth between the media and the White House.
They were asking about it, and in that the White
House at one point told them that they opposed surgery

(02:16:11):
for transgender youth. And then obviously that is, at least publicly,
that is a new position for the President who has
has been called not by me but by other people,
you know, one hundred percent pro trans super great ally
his entire administration. I disagree with that, but other people

(02:16:32):
have been saying that for a long time. And so
that took a lot of people by surprise and was
a big kind of kurf lefvel. And so that's kind
of the jumping off point for where we're going here.

Speaker 1 (02:16:42):
And so that happened.

Speaker 9 (02:16:44):
That came out on a Friday in the New York Times,
that the White House opposed surgery for trans miners, and
nobody talked there like. There were no responses from the orgs,
There was no additional reporting, no follow up from.

Speaker 1 (02:17:03):
The White House.

Speaker 9 (02:17:04):
That Friday, not that Saturday, not that Sunday, although that
Sunday Sunday evening, the heads of three national large national
LGBTQ advocacy orgs, HRC, Family Equality Council, and National LGBTQ
Task Force went on all three together an MSNBC show.

(02:17:29):
The host, I don't remember his name, but he has
an MSNBC show, writes for Washington Post and then also
contributes to PBS News Hour Right. And so none of
these three people that we pay to advocate for us
or this journalist brought up this very fresh, very pertinent,

(02:17:50):
very relevant, new White House position. They just talked about
how important it is to vote and how much fun
they had at Pride parades instead garbage, right, And so
it was very weird to me that these three people
who represent lgbt obviously organizations would not immediately vocally condemned
that kind of anti transtance. And it also blew my

(02:18:13):
mind that this journalist must be like allergic to scoops
or something like why yeah, why wouldn't you like that's
your chance right there?

Speaker 7 (02:18:21):
I mean I I genuine and you think the journalists
didn't know because like this stuff didn't break out of
like a very small sort of like transphere by this point, right.

Speaker 1 (02:18:32):
I mean, it's in the New York Times.

Speaker 7 (02:18:34):
You're given like but like like nobody cares about like people.
People don't care about us, like you. You would think
that these people would know, But like I genuinely don't
even know if this person had any idea what was happening.
Because I trust journalists to write about trans people about
as much as I trust myself to be able to
bench for us a car.

Speaker 9 (02:18:53):
So you know, yeah, so that came and went Sunday
evening Nope, And I was going in the whole time,
right because for me as a trans policy analyst, you know,
I have I've been I've noticed and been and been
calling Biden's transphobic rags and executive words and stuff problematic
and transphobic since I first noticed it and picked up

(02:19:14):
on it, which was you know, two or three years
ago now. And so for me, it was a very
kind of complicated feeling of Okay, Now, at least other
people don't have to take my word about the rags.
There's something they can look at and see it themselves.
But I was also, you know, completely threw off my
sleep schedule. I was bouncing off the walls, going and

(02:19:36):
seing and trying to you know, or organize responses. And
so the first org actually I think I believe it
was HRC, issued a statement Monday night and it was
a decent statement. I might have critiques of them whatever,
And then the rest of the orgs kind of didn't

(02:19:57):
issue statements until Tuesday evening, and so so that Tuesday
also the White House issued a statement that to clarify
their position, and the statement actually made it worse. So
what the statement said was that they do oppose surgery
for transgender youth. So they reiterated that, and then it

(02:20:19):
went on to say, however, we continue to support gender
affirming care for youth, such as mental health care.

Speaker 1 (02:20:30):
Period.

Speaker 9 (02:20:30):
I meant it was a common in theas other but
they didn't list other things that they supported, right, so, like,
the only thing they put in the list that they
supported was mental health care, which, to a policy person, again,
you're not sneaking those things past me. If you're talking
about trans healthcare and the only thing that you say
that you support is mental health care, I'm very worried.
I'm very concerned, right, because if you're pro trans and

(02:20:54):
you support transaccess to healthcare, it is not complicated or
hard or controversial for you to say, yeah, you know,
I support trans people and their access to health care.
They should have access to therapy, hormones, pubity blockers, surgery,
whatever they need. Like, it's not complex there, right, But
they didn't do that, and so to me that felt
even worse than kind of the initial position because it

(02:21:16):
signaled to me that there's likely we're likely kind of
losing them on not just surgery, it's all this other stuff.
And so two hours later that statement was updated, revised
and it took out saying they support mental health care

(02:21:37):
and was changed to say we support gender affirming care
like a continuum of care and used the words continuum
of care instead of mental health care. Now that doesn't
that feels like tripling down to me, because the problem
was that it was very overt what you left out,

(02:21:58):
and you had the opportunity to go back and fix it,
and then you continued. You just made new words that
very overtly leave out the kind of things that we
would need reassurance about, right, And so that's kind of
where things were at at that point.

Speaker 7 (02:22:14):
And yeah, we're gonna let's let's leave it there for
a second. You turn to the people who are funding
us talking about this, which is the I was gonna say,
the noble product products and services. I cannot promise their
nobility at all, but the products and service system support
this podcast.

Speaker 3 (02:22:30):
Here they are.

Speaker 4 (02:22:42):
Yeah, and we are back.

Speaker 7 (02:22:43):
And there's one other thing I want to mention before
we sort of get into where this went, which is
part of the fear that was going on, is that
at the same time as this is all happening, Labor
has taken power in the UK, and the Labor government
they're fucking okay, what what what can what what can
I say about the about West streeting that won't get

(02:23:05):
me impaled across there? Militantly transphobic piece of shit. I
think it's like their health secretary now, yes, yeah, the
masters over there don't forget Yeah, yeah, they're ministers came
out and said we're going to ban all children from
getting puberty blockers, not.

Speaker 1 (02:23:22):
Just on the NHS but all.

Speaker 7 (02:23:24):
Private healthcare everyone. Yeah, and this is a this is
an absolutely sort of terrifying step. It is going to
get a lot of kids killed. Want to reiterate, Yeah,
already already has there's a whole scandal over there about
like about the number of trus.

Speaker 9 (02:23:39):
The Good Law Project has you know, done the research
into like NHS minutes and all this stuff, and as
thinks that there have been sixteen suicides since this.

Speaker 7 (02:23:47):
Yeah, And I I also want to there's like a
sort of debunking thing that's going on that was from
data that like that that the party released. I was like, oh,
there weren't actually that many suicides. And the thing you
have to understand about those numbers is that those numbers
don't count people in waitlists, and the waitlists are not
the only place that people die, but they kill a
lot of people. So I want to sort of like, yeah,

(02:24:08):
we got to get that sort of context in which
is we're in this position not.

Speaker 9 (02:24:12):
Just streating right the farmers and then there are a
whole lot have very vocally transphobic labor MPs.

Speaker 7 (02:24:18):
Yeah, and and that you know, that's there's a lot
of fear that the Democratic Party can sort of take
this even more extreme path than the sort of stuff
we've been saying. And you know, I'm gonna include the
standard thing about puberty blockers, which is we give these
We give puberty blockers to like literal like five year
old CIS children. They're fine, it's complete, like they're completely safe.

(02:24:39):
There's no there's no downside.

Speaker 9 (02:24:40):
Apparently puberty blockers only have dangerous terrifying side effects used
and they can tell when they're in a transbody, and
it's a fine.

Speaker 7 (02:24:47):
Yeah, I only do the bad things. We've created the
trends specific bio weapon like you know, so like that
this all of this stuff is safe, and it's not
only safe, it saves lives, like the difference between you know,
like any trans person can tell you, the difference between
being on your hormones and being off your hormones is

(02:25:07):
night and day. It is the difference between being alive
and not being alive, Like it is the difference between
having sort of like a stable like stable interiority and
feeling like you don't exist every fucking day.

Speaker 9 (02:25:19):
So well, we're not just talking about being on your
right hormones, but in this case, we're also talking about
preventing being on the wrong hormones, right, which can be
even more experciated.

Speaker 7 (02:25:29):
Yeah, it's terrible, Like yeah, and so there's there's this
real fear that what we're seeing here is a pivot
to UK style stuff. And one of the things I
do in the UK that was specifically worrying about that
language about mental health care is one of the big
turf tactics is pushing this thing where we go, oh, well,
we're going to have this like you know, we're gonna
give you mental health care. We're going to like help

(02:25:50):
you figure out what your gender is. Is they call
it like exploratory care. This is conversion therapy. Yeah, that's
what they are talking about. And you know, seeing the
White House suddenly pivot to this language that is effectively
identical to again the UK thing where they're like, we're
going to give these consciversion therapy was terrifying.

Speaker 1 (02:26:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:26:12):
And then so the I think that the space between
that Friday with the New York Times article and then
the Tuesday with that clarification, I think the fact that
the orgs were so quiet and didn't offer any pushback
and didn't organize community to demand better to ban their
retract it. Like I think that that's what gave them

(02:26:34):
the room to essentially double and triple down in that
statement on Tuesday. And so that coincided, unfortunately with a
couple other anti transdevelopments in the Democratic Party in a
way that I find very worrying, especially when taken kind
of as a constellation. Right, So, that same week, the

(02:26:55):
Senate Armed Services Committee. So the NDAA is a large
military funding bill, the National Events Authorization Act, and the
House has been passing versions with lots of transphobic riders
in them, and then for the last couple of years,
the Senate has been taking those out and passing a
clean version, and then ultimately it's a clean version of
that gets an active Last year, I was very, very

(02:27:17):
worried that we would lose on that and that it
would go through with the writers and the implications here.
So the DoD Department of Events funds healthcare for the
VA and Trycare. I think there's one other smaller program
kind of similar that's a different name and effort, but
largely VA and tringcare so for active service members and

(02:27:38):
their families and veterans, which is I think I last
read like ten million people or something. And so if
they cut off public funding for trans healthcare through those programs,
a whole lot of people are going to lose it,
and we're going to very quickly wind up in a
situation like abortion is with the High Amendment, where no
public money can be used on our healthcare. And so

(02:27:59):
that week, the same time, the Senate Armed Services Committee
had their version of the NDAA, and Committee Joe Manchin
voted with Republicans to attach to these transphobic riders to it,
and then it was everyone in the committee except for
three people. I believe it was Warren, one other Democrat,
and I think possibly one Republican who voted against it.

(02:28:21):
But all the other Democrats on the committee voted to
pass it out of committee with those transphobic riders, which
is terrifying. Yeah, and Senator Kelly has introduced a floor
amendment to take those out, but whether his mimit even
makes it to the floor, I don't know. And what

(02:28:41):
the vote looks like that like on that, I don't know.
So I'm really worried that the NDA will pass with
these riders in it, and then subsequent spending bills for
other departments will as well. And then simultaneously there's the
third thing. Over Biden's term, there have been over he's
had over two hundred of his judicial nominees that he's
offered up and over his whole term, not a single

(02:29:04):
time has a Democrat opposed one of his judicial nominees.
But that week us Off actually opposed one of his
judicial nominees over the fact that she had sent a
trans woman to women's prison, so specifically a transphobic reason
for objecting, and so she didn't denominated. And that's the

(02:29:26):
first time that has happened over Biden's term from what
I read, And so there are just lots of these
signals that kind of back me up in my feeling
that the support that you know, everyone has been pretending
that the Democratic Party has for trans people. I mean,
I read their eggs, so I know better, but it

(02:29:47):
is not. It is an illusion, right, and when it shatters,
it's going to come apart really fast, and people are
going to be really surprised by it because our organizations
have not been kind of educating people along the way.

Speaker 7 (02:30:00):
Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna come back and talk more
about this, and we're also going to come back very
specifically to the trans woman in women's prisons thing, because
I really truly do not think since people understand how
fucking bad that is. Yeah, we're gonna come back to
that after these ads. Yeah, so we're back. Yeah. So

(02:30:29):
I wanted to specifically highlight the prisons thing in the
context of you know, Okay, so there's a chance by
the time this comes out that Biten is no longer
than m me your lips to God tears.

Speaker 4 (02:30:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (02:30:42):
The issue with this is that the strongest possibility for
replacing him is Kamala Harris. And you know, I'm gonna
ask you to explain Kamala Harris's record on trans women
in fucking prisons because it is appalling.

Speaker 9 (02:30:57):
Because I can never escape these Shipler. I actually worked
at TLC while we were suing the State of California. Yeah,
Transgender Lassoner TLC. We had to sue the State of
California for incarcerated trans people to be able to access
healthcare that they deserved, and Kamala Harris, as the age

(02:31:18):
of the State of California, defended the state's position that
they did not they did have a right to healthcare.
We won, she lost, But so she is not someone
that I can ever trust with trans lives, right, especially
because there have been other issues, I think marijuana most recently,

(02:31:40):
where she has tried to kind of trumpet that she
has used her discretion and not prosecuted certain things or whatever. Right,
And that doesn't help me at all, right, because it
shows you know, you have prosecutor, you know you have
discretion in what cases you take and what you defend
and all this stuff, and you used it to prevent
trans people.

Speaker 1 (02:32:00):
I'm geting healthcare.

Speaker 7 (02:32:02):
Yeah, And I want to also specifically talk about the
part about this judge sending a transfer into a women's prison,
which is the thing that you should do, because this
is the kind of thing that has to be opposed
at all costs, because you know, prison is violent enough
for everyone, it is even worse for us. And the

(02:32:23):
fact that Democrats are like, you know, it looks like
we're seeing the sort of tide break on this and
especially specifically on this issue where the consequences are so
dire it is, it is extremely bad.

Speaker 9 (02:32:38):
Yeah, And so I kind of had the suspicion that
there was a deal struck on the NDAA that Democrats
And this is solely me speculating, right, I have no
insider information about this, speculating that the Democrats kind of
accepted a deal on the NDA that there would be
some level of anti trans writers that they would accept

(02:33:02):
and into the enacted law, and that after making that deal,
the White House felt they could kind of move to
the right publicly on trans people because you know, it
would be in the news from the NBA passing, that
they could start kind of preparing people for that by

(02:33:23):
kind of making a public and kind of moving to
the right word there.

Speaker 7 (02:33:25):
Right.

Speaker 1 (02:33:26):
So that's kind of what I suspect maybe happened. I
don't know, but it is.

Speaker 9 (02:33:30):
It doesn't vode well for us, especially because you know,
so the the White House's position has already been cited
in at least one judicial opinion. Ye and then was
also recently cited Yester the day before yesterday or not now, yeah, Friday,
I think it was Friday in New Hampshire as justification

(02:33:53):
from Governor Sunu for signing their surgery van there. And
so these things have immediate consequences even before they show
up in executive branch policy. And this is why I
have been very convinced ever since kind of I read
the policy Tea Leaves and the Executive orders and rags

(02:34:15):
and kind of identified that we were dealing with the
functionally a hostile executive branch.

Speaker 1 (02:34:21):
I've been trying. I tried as hard.

Speaker 9 (02:34:23):
As I could to get movement leadership to switch from
a kiss ass framework to a take names framework, right Yeah,
but they just they haven't done it. So the community
just doesn't. It's going to feel like whiplash, I think
for a lot of folks who aren't kind of deep
into this stuff and then don't follow me on Twitter

(02:34:44):
to see me yelling about five hundred page regulations. But
it makes me worried that, you know, the leadership is
not advocating for trans people appropriately. And I think that
if this is demonstrating that they're not don't have leverage
or they're not willing to bring a leverage to bear
on whoever the nominee is when it's not Biden, right, Like,

(02:35:07):
they're not setting the movement up to have strong footing
to hold people accountable to trans equality kind of on
the campaign trail, and that's really scary looking at labor,
especially as kind of a blueprint.

Speaker 7 (02:35:24):
Yeah we're gonna be talking of God, Yeah, we're gonna
be talking about shot o'brien'soking dog shit weird fascist turn
later with some teamsters. Well hopefully, well we'll see well
see well see apps the episode. But yeah, yeah, it's
very bad. But also it's not We're not in a
position yet where this is inevitable, right right, Like it

(02:35:45):
doesn't have to happen. And the way that it gets
this gets stopped from happening is by US organizing, in
US fighting and US putting pressure on these people to
fucking do this because you know, and like this, this
is this, this has always been the thing. Like these
people unfortunately they do need us, right, they hate it,
but you know, these like the Democratic Party needs us.

Speaker 1 (02:36:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:36:07):
We got to see last month during Pride month, they
all show up at Pride parades. Yeah yeah right, it's
like y'all actually don't belong here, Why.

Speaker 4 (02:36:15):
Are you fuck off?

Speaker 1 (02:36:17):
Yeah?

Speaker 7 (02:36:17):
And it's like you know, they like they they they
they have been successfully sort of like feasting off of
the movement that we build for decades now. And it
is you know, if they're going to fucking if they're
going to fucking eat our corpses, it is, it is,
it is, it is absolutely time for them to fucking
try to defend us. And the only way that's going
to happen is if we we actually start mobilizing it,

(02:36:39):
we start putting pressure on these people to like not
fucking back down and write us off for dead.

Speaker 9 (02:36:47):
But the way that the national organizations have been moving, right,
like the positive press and the praise that they've given
deepen Biden's shittiest actions and inactions on trans people actively
stimy's commune you organizing, right, because if I have to
explain a five hundred page regulation to show people that
Biden's transphobic, that and they're just like no, but look,

(02:37:11):
this HRC statement says it's actually great policy, it's a
big barrier to overcome or community organizing there, right.

Speaker 7 (02:37:19):
So yeah, and you know, the the the other sort
of issue here, right, is that the Republican Party is
I mean, I don't know if hurling towards is even
the right word, but they are They are very very
very close to what is effectively like banning Transmit from
public life and their eventual goal of wiping us out.

Speaker 9 (02:37:41):
Right.

Speaker 7 (02:37:41):
Yeah, and you know, if there's no actual force to
oppose that, because all of these sort of national organizations
are busy sort of kissing ass instead of actually fighting.
We are in deep trouble.

Speaker 9 (02:37:53):
Yeah, and I think and I think we are. I
think we are in deep trouble. But like you said,
it is not a done yet right. I was actually heartened.

Speaker 1 (02:38:02):
I was very I was terrified.

Speaker 9 (02:38:05):
So Zoe Zoe's Ephyr, the trans representative state representative from Montana.
After the draft bad Title nine regulation came out, she
organized an open letter from fourteen out of sixteen out
trans and non binary state electeds against it. They released
it a couple of days after all of the orgs
put out their praise were they're praising statements and they

(02:38:25):
looked really dumb. So she actually organized another open letter
of out trans and non binary state legislators against this.
It wasn't the you know, the full compliment because it
was over a weekend, really scrambly, but just like the
Title nine one, Dana Carome and Sarah McBride did not
sign it.

Speaker 7 (02:38:42):
Why can you explain who that is by the way
for the audience.

Speaker 9 (02:38:44):
Yeah, So Dana Carome is a trans state representative from Virginia,
and then Sarah McBride is an out trans legislator from
Biden's home state of Delaware. And the mc brides are
actually family friends with the Bidens, and Joe Biden actually

(02:39:06):
wrote the forward to Sarah McBride's memoirs, autobiography whatever you
call it, right, But she's also a Zionist, and she
is a kind of centrist, center right Democrat who you know,
as I've talked to people, my understanding is that she
didn't sign on to the title nine letter because she

(02:39:28):
has you know, rising Star and the Democratic Party aspirations.
She's probably going to be the first trans congress person soon.
I hate it, and so I was extremely concerned that
Sarah McBride, who you know, because of those ties and
because she's probably going to be in Congress soon, is
the most kind of politically powerful trans person in the country.

(02:39:48):
I was extremely worried that she was going to join
the Biden administration on this. So I agro posted the
ship posts that are for several days, and thankfully she
she did condemn it and kind.

Speaker 1 (02:40:06):
Yeah, right, go.

Speaker 9 (02:40:09):
I was seriously concerned about that because you know, just
these the forces, this anti transit humanization campaign is so
powerful and so strong at this point that a lot
of people are making the calculation that if they want
to advance in politics.

Speaker 1 (02:40:28):
They got a multuous you know, and I.

Speaker 9 (02:40:32):
Don't think highly id and don't think highly enough and
Sarah to have been confident that she wouldn't do that, yeah, And.

Speaker 7 (02:40:38):
I think that's you know, that's also one of the
really hard parts about this is like you, I don't know,
as much as there is sort of intercommunity solidarity among
trans people, you can't even trust your own people when
they take power right, right, And you know, this isn't
to say like this is one of the rare times

(02:40:58):
where like I think there are like there's legislators who
do good stuff, like Zoey's effort has been doing great,
But you have to keep the pressure on everyone, no
matter who they are about it, where they come from,
you have to you have to keep pressuring them, because I.

Speaker 1 (02:41:11):
Mean, that's my experience as now does.

Speaker 7 (02:41:14):
Yeah, if you don't, we're going to get We're going
to get left behind and left to die. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:41:21):
And so like one of the one of the ways
that this has been so dismaying for me, right is
that trans people don't have any or any national organization
that advocates for them full throatdly, principally in a trans
maximalist kind of unapologetic way, right, it's always all of

(02:41:44):
the orgs, all the lgbtq worgs and the Transpacific orgs,
which is kind of what I'm getting to all kind
of take this very.

Speaker 1 (02:41:53):
Centrist tech or they have over the last several years
with Biden.

Speaker 9 (02:41:57):
They were all kind of a lot happier to be
radical when Trump is pres but no longer. Right, Yeah,
And my my main issue is even if you are,
you know, a rich DC strategist who leads, who runs
these movement orgs like you know they are, and you believe,
even you believe that the balance between kind of strident,

(02:42:20):
principled advocacy and lobbying blazer tightened up moderated advocacy is
way further in the moderated direction than I do.

Speaker 1 (02:42:29):
Even if you believe that, you still.

Speaker 9 (02:42:32):
Understand the need for some group with a voice to
articulate the trans maximalist position, to articulate the standards by
which you know, politicians are going to be measured if
they're going to be considered pro trans.

Speaker 1 (02:42:48):
And what we have not seen is the trans.

Speaker 9 (02:42:51):
Specific organization, so specifically National Center for transgener Quality n
CT and Transferred Legal Education Defense Fund, till death. They
recently merged into Advocates for Trans Equality, which is abbreviated
A for a te don't ask, don't ask, But like,

(02:43:12):
why let the LGBT, let HRC do the centrist bullshit,
Let them put out milk toast statements, let them praise
politicians who don't fully support us. Right, but we need
at least one organization representing trans people to lay out
the full case to present kind of our actual policy

(02:43:36):
needs and be the rubric by which everyone else can
be measured. And also just for community education, so we know,
so the community knows without you know, people like organizers,
people like me trying to overcome these huge, these huge
walls to get people to understand what's going on, can
see what's being done to us, know what we deserve

(02:43:57):
in terms of policy, and then measure what is actually
being done for us against that bar.

Speaker 7 (02:44:03):
Yeah, And I think one of the other frustrating aspects
of this is something that you talk about a lot,
is that the people who do the work in these organizations, right,
you're sort of like, you know, your sort of staffers
or researchers to people on the on the sort of
bottom of the pyramid. You make all this stuff function.
They don't get a say in how these you know,
and how how these fucking orgers put these things out.

Speaker 9 (02:44:25):
No, most of them are radical anarchists and communists like
I am right. They they really really want to do
what we need to be done, and it's just you know,
comes down from on high that that's not what they're doing.
And I know that I am not the only trans
National ORG staffer who has been silenced by the White

(02:44:49):
House or the White House reached out directly to my bosses.
I think I mentioned it the last time I was
on Yeah, but I know that's happened to my colleagues,
friends at other organizations. And I know that I have
a lot of privileges that that a lot of people don't,
so I can kind of get fired or I could.
I do not maybe couldn't afford it anymore. I get
fired for my principles, and I don't, you know, I don't,

(02:45:12):
I don't judge, you know, my my comrades and colleagues
horstal kind of doing the best they can. But I'm
really really scared with with leadership and the way that
they have not recognized kind of the situation they've gotten a.

Speaker 7 (02:45:29):
Sent to Yeah, and I think the thing I want
to close on is what do you think are effective
things that people can do sort of now right? And
people who aren't in the top of these power structures.
Although if you're for some reason you're the head of
one of these orgs and you're listening to this, what
the fuck are you doing? Please do better?

Speaker 2 (02:45:48):
But yeah, what what?

Speaker 7 (02:45:49):
What?

Speaker 6 (02:45:49):
What?

Speaker 7 (02:45:50):
What kinds of things can people do on top of
sort of just like community education?

Speaker 9 (02:45:54):
And yeah, yeah, so, I mean I I think the
real thing that I mean, I've courage people to do
this on Twitter as well, is if you see one
of these national organizations fall short of one hundred percent
and advocating for a transop, if you see them equivocate
about you know, maybe banning surgery isn't that bad because

(02:46:16):
it's not super common, or maybe it's okay not to
demand that Biden, you know, explicitly say that he supports
you know, these parts of these components of our healthcare
before calling him on hundred percent protrans on healthcare.

Speaker 1 (02:46:30):
You know, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 9 (02:46:32):
If you see them fall short of that, you know,
don't trust them anymore. I don't donate to them anymore.
Take that money, attention, time, and energy and turn it
to mutual aid efforts, to local organizing efforts to supporting
trans people in Red states. Campaign for southerner Quality just
expanded their their practical support program to be not just

(02:46:57):
a subset of of Red states that they will help
trans youth in families in, but all Red states that
are that are facing healthcare bands and similar anti trans measures.
Support that fund right, go look at and if you
don't know of a of a local trans group or
a state transgroup near you doing good work, you can

(02:47:20):
go to transjustice funding projects kind of grantee map. They're
really low barrier only grant to translated groups and you
can see what those groups are doing and you can
hook up with them or donate to them. But I
think that the biggest thing is not I mean, we
Lord knows, we need money, we're all poor as shit, yeah,
But mainly, but mostly honestly, what I think we need

(02:47:42):
is we need vocal, visible support. We need assist people
not to remain silent or passive when they hear or
see transphobia, or when they hear or see someone equivocating
on well maybe you know, maybe kids aren't old enough
to know their trands. Like if you're that just sounds

(02:48:04):
insane actual trans people, right, but you know it can
take this people, right, And so if you are a
SIS ally, being an ally is an action, right, And
we need that now more than ever as the stakes
of the risks of being attached to us supporting us
grow higher, right, Like, we need principal allies to stand

(02:48:27):
with us. And so if you can do that in
your daily life, you can be a trans advocate in
your kind of routine.

Speaker 1 (02:48:34):
We desperately need that.

Speaker 7 (02:48:36):
Yeah, And I think that's a good I know that
that's a good sort of rallying cry. It's like all
all you know, and this has always substantively been one
of the big issues with being trans is that we
are one percent of the population right now. Right, that's
probably gonna rise in the future, but right now are
sort of distributed pauls, like our distributed impacts on politics.

(02:48:58):
You know, we have an outsized impact of paul But
for one percent of the population, we can't fight nine
percent of the population, right, So we need we need
your help, and we need you know, we need not
just sort of milk toast lip service.

Speaker 9 (02:49:13):
We need to actually fight, Yeah, we need people in
your life to know you know that you are fully
pro trands and that means that you kind of learned
maybe how to talk about trans healthcare to educate other
folks who won't know as much, or you are able
to develop and kind of share a personal story about

(02:49:34):
how you learned about trans people and uh and became
you know, an outlying right, So learning how to do
that work I think is super important.

Speaker 7 (02:49:43):
So this is this is spinning can happen here, Kriinn,
Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Speaker 1 (02:49:48):
Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 9 (02:49:49):
Like I said that timing of the last show, Yeah,
very smart.

Speaker 7 (02:49:53):
It's yeah, we I have I have a weird knack
for tibing this stuff correctly for mostly for but you know, yeah,
just been nicking up here. You can find us in
the places and yeah, go go support the trans people
in your life because the Lord knows they need it.

Speaker 9 (02:50:13):
Yeah, and you can follow me. Yeah, so I'm crankering,
I share they pronouns, and I'm at gay Narcan on Twitter.
You can find me there for hot trans policy takes
that are not moderated by centrist calm staff.

Speaker 7 (02:50:28):
Yeah, and don't find me on Twitter. Absolutely not.

Speaker 2 (02:50:37):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the Universe.

Speaker 4 (02:50:43):
It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 5 (02:50:45):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
monthly at cool zonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Behind the Bastards News

Follow Us On

Host

Robert Evans

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club

Dateline NBC

Stuff You Should Know

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}It Could Happen Here Weekly 140